Chapter 1: What unexpected journey did Riley Gaines embark on?
Hello. Hello.
Very nice to meet you.
Yes, and you. You've been on a wild little journey, huh? A journey that I certainly never expected, never wanted, still don't want. So yeah. Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you would have to be an advocate for women's sports? For sanity. For sanity, yeah. No, no. Never did I imagine that anyone would have to be in the position that I'm in. Nevertheless, me.
So like you said, it really has been a wild almost two years now. I graduated college, set to be a dentist in dental school, wanting to specialize in endodontics, which weirdly enough is root canals. So to say that this is a totally different path than I could have ever anticipated doesn't do it justice. Yeah, that's a minor understatement. Yeah, right. Exactly.
So walk us through the beginnings of this for you. What was your first introduction to this insanity of biological men with gender dysphoria trying to compete with women? So... I'll take you through my kind of timeline here. Okay. Started swimming when I was four years old, right?
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Chapter 2: How did Riley Gaines become an advocate for women's sports?
I come from a family of athletes. So my dad was an NFL player. My mom, she played D1 softball. My oldest sister, she played softball. I went to Ole Miss. My brother, he's in college playing football now. All my uncles won Super Bowls and all this stuff. So come from a family of athletes. Started swimming when I was four, graduated when I was 22.
So, you know, 18 years of my life, I really dedicated to my sport. Impossible to put in the words, you know, this, the time and the hours and the dedication and the sacrifices that it takes to compete and ultimately be successful at the highest level. But of course, I was willing to do this, I knew I had to.
Right, you don't get to go to prom, you don't get to have sleepovers with your friends on Friday night because guess what? Practice at 6 a.m. on Saturday. All of that to really say it's a lifelong journey. College rolls around. Truth be told, I really could have gone anywhere that I wanted to swim. I'm absolutely biased, and the SEC is the best conference.
So I knew that was for me, but went to University of Kentucky. Could not have been a better place for me. So freshman year, right, there was a lot of adjusting. It was a lot of time and hours. I thought I worked hard before. I was wrong. We were in the water six hours every single day, with three of those hours being before 8 a.m., right? So you practice from 5 a.m.
to 8 a.m., go to class, come back, practice again from 1.30 to 4.30. Ate your dinner, iced your shoulders, went to bed, did it all again the next day. We swam about 15,000 yards every single day, which is equivalent to like 10-ish miles. So lots of adjusting. Sophomore year, still improving though, still getting better. Sophomore year rolls around.
I really started having this breakout season, started doing some pretty great things, really had finally developed like a sense of consistency, I think. And about three days before we were supposed to leave for our national championships, which, of course, you know, the NCAA, think about basketball, the NCAA tournament equivalent in swimming. We are ready to go.
The meet you work all year, really all your life for. About three days before we were supposed to leave in March of 2020, our coaches pull us out of the water, sit us down, say, look, you know, if you live in the dorm rooms, pack your stuff up. You have to leave campus tonight. Of course, COVID had hit. I didn't really know what this meant at the time.
There's still a lot of uncertainty around this. So I thought this meant we got a weekend off. We got to go home. We'd quickly return. But of course, that was not a correct assumption because upon going back home, home is Tennessee for me. Right. There were no pools open. There were no gyms open, nothing like that. And so every day I swam miles aimlessly in the lake.
I put on a wetsuit and I jump in the boat dock and I'd swim down by Johnny Cash's house. And I came back and I did the same route every single day because, again, I knew that I had to. If I wanted to continue this breakout season, I was having my junior year and my sophomore year into my junior year.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Riley face during her college swimming career?
Right. And the amount of snakes that I swam by and like dead catfish that are floating on top of the water that like hit you in your face while you're swimming is not pleasant. But eventually we were able to come back junior year.
We had to deal with all the COVID theatrics, which I'll be the first person to say that being a college athlete, really being a college student, I would argue being a human during the time of COVID was miserable, to say the least.
But especially being an athlete, right, in terms of the mask mandates and the social distancing and the contact tracing and the mandatory vaccines, which have you ever seen a swimmer in the pool wearing a mask?
I have.
You have?
I have. I watch videos of it.
Well, we essentially waterboarded ourselves.
It's so fucking stupid.
Isn't it?
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Chapter 4: How did Riley's experiences shape her views on competition and fairness?
I felt guilty for participating in the farce. I felt guilty for even getting in the water at this point. And so it kind of hit me. I won't say I was necessarily cowering because I didn't feel like that to me. I wasn't necessarily scared to approach the topic. I just thought someone else would. I thought a coach would. would say something. I thought some other swimmer.
I thought someone with political power, someone within the NCAA. Quite honestly, I thought someone's dad would come down there and yank this man out of our locker rooms. But it was in that moment... where we were standing on the podium, myself included. I'm standing on the podium and we're clapping and we're smiling and we're cheering. And it hit me.
I'm like, what in the world are we clapping for? Because, I mean, really what we're applauding is our own erasure, our own demolition. And so it was right then and there that, again, like a slap across the face, I was like, How in the world can we as women, as female athletes, expect someone to stand up for us if we aren't even willing to stand up for us? Like, this has to come from us.
So, again, I knew all season the unfair competition was wrong. I knew all season that the locker room aspect was wrong. I knew that the silencing that we were facing from our universities, I knew all of that was wrong. We all did.
But it wasn't until this official reduced everything that we had worked our entire lives for down to a photo op to validate the feelings and the identity of a man at the expense of our own. That's really when I decided that I couldn't continue being silent. 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?
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Chapter 5: What are the consequences of denying biological differences in sports?
That's La La Land. They're living in the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory. Those people are out of their fucking minds. The Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory sounds better than America. It sounds way better. But they're literally out of their minds. Like, and this is unsustainable. It is. At some point in time. And we realize that because, honestly, truth and sanity, they always prevail. Yeah.
It's just kind of a matter of time. Unfortunately, it takes... unfortunate circumstances, like the whole Leah Thomas thing, like the San Francisco State thing, like the things that continue to happen, it takes those to really see the harm and the severity and the likelihood that they continue at an exponential rate.
So again, I kind of look at what's going on or, you know, in particular what happened to me as a lemons to lemonade thing, right?
Chapter 6: How has Riley Gaines turned her experiences into advocacy?
You take something that should have never happened to anyone, but you do good with it. And that's certainly what I've been trying to do over these past, again, two years. And it has. There's been a lot of good stuff that's been done. We see a lot of the negative. We see a lot of the bad. And certainly that's what's highlighted because that's what That's what gets attention.
That's what gets clicks. That's what gets likes. But now in just two short years, 24 states have some sort of fairness and women's sports bill when only I think three years ago, only one state did. So so that's pretty incredible. Lots of traction, lots of momentum. Like I said, four states implementing a bill now that defines the word woman.
We've seen lots of pushback at the IOC, the International Olympic Committee.
Chapter 7: What role does sports play in developing leadership skills?
So there's been lots of good things that have been done. And I certainly choose to celebrate the little wins when we get them. Well, what you've done is very courageous because I know the kind of pressure that you must have experienced. I know the hate that's come your way. And you handle it with class. And that is – not a learned thing.
And I think that speaks to one of the things that I think is one of the most important things that kids can ever get involved in, and that's sports.
Definitely.
I know people think of sports as being like, if you're an intellectual, you think of it as being like a jock or a meathead thing. But it teaches you a resolve. It teaches you, when you have to swim six hours a day, you have to be strong mentally. And it transcends beyond...
just your athletic achievements which is my point is how you can handle this the way you can handle it and honestly now like i love pressure i love it i love setting goals and achieving those goals which which sets me up perfectly yeah for this position um and you're right like i would highly encourage my parents did it my parents made me play sports
And when, you know, my dad being a professional football player, he did not, I won't say he didn't, he never really cared what sport I played.
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Chapter 8: How can individuals make a difference in societal issues?
But when I started swimming, he's like, Riley, come on, that's not a sport. I'm like, Dad, it is a sport. Like, it's hard. Like, we work hard. He's like, no, Riley, that's not a sport. Then I started dating a swimmer. And my dad was like, Riley, any sport, his justification was any sport where a man has to wear panties and competes. They're gay, Riley. He's like, you're dating someone who's gay.
I'm like, dad. And now he's my husband. And now, of course, he knows he's not gay and he's the best. That's hilarious. But all that to say.
That sounds funny.
Yeah. I had to refrain him from going in the locker room at that national championships. I called him. I'm like, dad.
There's a man in our locker room because we didn't know this was going to be the arrangement until we saw it, until like we were actually in there with this, again, six foot four man stripping down, fully intact, exposing himself inches away from where we were simultaneously fully undressed. Right. Like I can't even put into words like the.
The feeling of having your back turned and all of a sudden, again, naked, hearing a man's voice in the locker room. It's like it was innate, inherent for every girl in that changing space to cover themselves, like whether it was with their hands or their towels or their clothes, like it was inherent.
Um, that's so psychotic.
So I called my dad. I'm like, dad, there's a man in this locker room. He's like, Riley, I'm coming down there and I'm going to handle this myself. And I really was like, dad, like, like he would, like he would do that. And I'm like, no, we already have one man in the locker room. We don't need to. And secondly, like you'll go to jail and I don't want you there. So I got this. I can handle it.
Which again, that's, The things that I think set me apart from some of my teammates or competitors or other people in my same position is playing sports. I credit so much of my success and impact that's been had to playing sports. Secondly, it's having a strong family foundation. I have two parents, two amazing parents who love each other.
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