Over the weekend, Olympian Simone Biles discovered herself in an uncommon competitors, going through off towards former school athlete turned conservative political activist Riley Gaines in a confrontation. 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 workforce, deliberately misgendering the workforce’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, in fact, is a world-famous gymnast with 11 Olympic medals to her title (seven gold, two silver, and two bronze). She has a number of gymnastics expertise named after her and is 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 confrontation with the biggest 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 received a Little League championship as a toddler. But finally, she selected a special sport to pursue: competitive swimming. Gaines received the 100-yard butterfly and 100-yard freestyle in the TISCA High School Swimming & Diving State Championships in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2017. The 12 months prior, she was invited to take part in her first US Olympic Trials in the 100 free, however failed to make the reduce after ending in eighty fifth place.
Despite the setback, Gaines kept on swimming. For school, she was recruited to swim Division 1 at the University of Kentucky as the quantity two recruit out of Tennessee and quantity 98 general in the class of 2018. There, she discovered a number 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 in the 2021 NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships, inserting seventh in the 200 freestyle race however profitable a silver medal in 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 podium—in the NCAA WD1 Championship’s 200-yard freestyle last in March 2022. Despite Gaines’s failure to medal, 2022 was a very good 12 months 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 courting; and she or he graduated with a level in well being sciences. She additionally retired from aggressive swimming, having by no means competed professionally or participated in the Olympic Games. Her authentic aspiration was to attend dental faculty.
However, Gaines’s life trajectory would quickly change after one fateful matchup at the finish of her collegiate profession. In March 2022, throughout the final meet of Gaines’s profession, she tied with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place in the NCAA 200-yard freestyle championship. Thomas would go on to change into the first brazenly trans girl to win an NCAA championship, after rising victorious in the 500-yard freestyle. Thomas’s win added gas to the hearth concerning the ongoing 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 at 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 stated 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.
