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Over the weekend, Olympian Simone Biles discovered herself in an uncommon competitors, dealing with off in opposition to former school athlete turned conservative political activist Riley Gaines in a disagreement. The two discovered themselves in a heated debate on X about trans athletes in ladies’s sports activities, an argument that took the web by storm.
Biles ripped into Gaines after the conservative pundit disparaged a championship-winning highschool softball staff, deliberately misgendering the staff’s 17-year-old trans star pitcher. “You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race,” Biles wrote, referencing Gaines’s previous as a D1 athlete. “Straight up sore loser.”
Biles, after all, is a world-famous gymnast with 11 Olympic medals to her identify (seven gold, two silver, and two bronze). She has a number of gymnastics abilities named after her and is essentially the most adorned gymnast of all time, no matter gender.
Gaines is…properly, who’s she? What race did she lose? And how did she wind up embroiled in a disagreement with the best gymnast of all time? Here’s every thing you want to find out about Riley Gaines.
Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2000, Gaines is the daughter of two collegiate athletes, Brad and Telisha Gaines, a soccer participant and a softball participant, respectively. She was a multisport athlete who gained a Little League championship as a toddler. But in the end, she selected a distinct sport to pursue: aggressive swimming. Gaines gained the 100-yard butterfly and 100-yard freestyle within the TISCA High School Swimming & Diving State Championships in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2017. The yr prior, she was invited to take part in her first US Olympic Trials within the 100 free, however didn’t make the reduce after ending in eighty fifth place.
Despite the setback, Gaines stored on swimming. For school, she was recruited to swim Division 1 on the University of Kentucky because the quantity two recruit out of Tennessee and quantity 98 general within the class of 2018. There, she discovered plenty of success, making a number of All-SEC groups (that’s the Southeastern Conference, for the uninitiated) and racking up a good variety of SEC and NCAA accolades. She competed within the 2021 NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships, putting seventh within the 200 freestyle race however profitable a silver medal within the 4 × 200-yard freestyle relay. She additionally certified for the US Olympic Trials once more in 2021 however didn’t compete.
In school, her highest-ranking particular person occasion end nationally was fifth place —reminder, that’s off the rostrum—within the NCAA WD1 Championship’s 200-yard freestyle ultimate in March 2022. Despite Gaines’s failure to medal, 2022 was a great yr for her each competitively and personally: She was named the 2022 SEC Women’s Swimming & Diving Scholar-Athlete of the Year; she married fellow University of Kentucky swimmer Louis Barker after some three years of relationship; and he or she graduated with a level in well being sciences. She additionally retired from aggressive swimming, having by no means competed professionally or participated within the Olympic Games. Her unique aspiration was to attend dental college.
However, Gaines’s life trajectory would quickly change after one fateful matchup on the finish of her collegiate profession. In March 2022, over the past meet of Gaines’s profession, she tied with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place within the NCAA 200-yard freestyle championship. Thomas would go on to turn into the primary brazenly trans lady to win an NCAA championship, after rising victorious within the 500-yard freestyle. Thomas’s win added gasoline to the hearth concerning the continued nationwide debate about trans ladies’s participation in ladies’s sports activities.
At first, Gaines was cordial about Thomas’s win and directed her ire on the NCAA. “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career…because there’s no doubt that she works hard too, but she’s just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place, and that’s the issue,” she reportedly mentioned in an interview with The Daily Wire. But finally, Gaines did what many in her place have, pivoting to hawking right-wing conservative speaking factors and anti-trans rhetoric as her full-time job.