Riley Gaines

And so what was the first thing that you did?

As you can imagine, there was a ton of reporters there, like I said, which swimming is not a sport that garners media attention.

But this meet was unique because there was.

And so my inbox...

was filled with different reporters who had been reaching out to me from all the different outlets, left-leaning, right-leaning, everything in between, who were desperately hoping to get a quote or an interview that they could take back to their editor so they could have this story.

Because up until this point, remember, really no one had spoken about this, at least not with their face and their name to it.

Some people anonymously, even some of his teammates had spoken anonymously at this point.

And so we had been this training that we went to previously, I mentioned, where we had to learn how to use she her pronouns.

We were also told that any media opportunity that came our way, we had to forward on to our sports information director.

Now, this has been the case in the past.

They had never addressed this in the past because, again, swimming is just not a sport where this is ever.

So you had never been contacted by the media previously in your career?

I mean, I had done some stuff with ESPN and, you know, I broke the SEC record and all that stuff.

And so that was a pretty big deal.

And so there had been other stuff, but all mild, like softball kind of thing.

But there was nothing where you had to run it by other people before you were allowed to have these conversations.

Correct.

So this was the first time.

Correct.

And so they told us, though, like, we'll help you coordinate.