Linda Medalen is a former Norwegian

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 footballer

Football (soccer)

Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven players with a spherical ball...

.

She was one of Norway's most celebrated women footballers, finishing her international career with 152 caps

Cap (sport)

In sports, a cap is a metaphorical term for a player's appearance on a select team, such as a national team. The term dates from the practice in the United Kingdom of awarding a cap to every player in an international match of association football...

, scoring 64 goals. She was on the Norwegian team

Norway women's national football team

The Norway women's national football team represents Norway in international women's football. The team, controlled by the Football Association of Norway, are former European, World and Olympic champions and thus one of the most successful national teams...

 that won the 1995 FIFA Women's World Cup.

She played most of her career in Norway with Asker Fotball, and retired in 2006, at age 41. She also spent 7 seasons in Japan with Nikko. She started her career as a striker

Striker

Forwards, also known as strikers, are the players on a team in association football who play nearest to the opposing team's goal, and are therefore principally responsible for scoring goals...

, but as her career progressed, she moved further back on the field, and was playing toward the end of her career in central defence.

Apart from playing football, Linda Medalen works as a police

Police

The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...

 officer. In 2007 she was elected to serve as a local politician in Asker

Asker

Asker is a municipality in Akershus county, Norway. It is part of the Viken traditional region. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Asker. The municipality is a suburb of Oslo, the national capital...

 municipality council for the Conservative Party

Conservative Party of Norway

The Conservative Party is a Norwegian political party. The current leader is Erna Solberg. The party was since the 1920s consistently the second largest party in Norway, but has been surpassed by the growth of the Progress Party in the late 1990s and 2000s...

. Medalen is openly lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

, coming out in a Se og Hør article in June 1999. She stands at .