Pablo Torre

You can actually just see Leah pulling away at the end to win this one.

Not dominant, but a victory.

It wasn't a particularly fast time to win the 500 free.

It was like a notably slow winning time for the 500 free in the past 10 years.

So people were like acting insane over this.

Like she'd gone this jaw-dropping, Katie Ledecky rivaling time, and that's just not what happened.

But as for the race that did drop Jaws over time, the race that did launch the anti-trans athlete movement we've been talking about, that one was not the 500-yard freestyle.

It was this.

It was the 200-yard freestyle, which is where Leah Thomas and Riley Gaines are in the pool at the same time.

And I just got to note that this is, in fact, Riley Gaines' best event, the one that she's most comfortable swimming.

And this time capsule that we're watching here, while it is remarkable from the larger historical sociological perspective, as a race, it's pretty uneventful.

Taylor Ruck from Stanford is winning the whole time, wire to wire.

And in the 200-yard freestyle, it's a wire to wire win for Taylor Ruck.

Yeah, Taylor Ruck blows away the field, wins easily, and coming in fifth place with the same exact time of 1 minute and 43.40 seconds, as you can see on the leaderboard right here, are Riley Gaines and Leah Thomas.

We see her time come in and we're like, okay, like fifth, that's not what she wanted, but that's the highest she's ever placed at NCAA.

She's going to be, she has to be happy.

She added time, but that's the highest she's ever gotten.

And then I remember looking over and we were like, like, this isn't good.

And the thing that happens next is where you begin to glimpse the familiar version of the story that we know.

On the Daily Wire, which is Ben Shapiro's website, they publish an interview with Riley Gaines.