The swimmer tied a trans woman for fifth. The MAGA industrial complex took care of the rest.
Madison Pauly at Mother Jones:
At a White House ceremony last February, before President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund schools if they permit transgender girls to play girls’ sports, he turned and looked over his shoulder. Behind him stood former college swimmer Riley Gaines, wearing suffragette white in a crowd of young female athletes and conservative activists. “You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Trump told the 24-year-old. Almost three years, to be exact. Since tying for fifth place in a March 2022 championship race against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, Gaines has used the story of their matchup to leap to the vanguard of the anti-trans movement, campaigning not just to ban trans women from women’s sports, but to end public acceptance of transgender people.
Gaines joined the political fray just as 14 states had already enacted restrictions on trans athletes and four more were on the verge of doing the same. With backing from GOP donors like the Amway billionaire DeVos family, she has crisscrossed the country with a simple message: Women’s sports need “saving” from “men”—that is, transgender girls and women. No matter that the NCAA president said in 2024 that less than 0.002 percent of college athletes at the time were openly transgender (the percentage of Olympians is about the same). Gaines and her allies argue that trans athletes are stealing opportunities from every woman and girl who competes with them. Alongside other athletes, she filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to ban trans girls from girls’ school sports nationwide, arguing that trans-inclusive policies are a form of discrimination against women.
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Thanks in large part to Gaines, trans athletes became the reddest of red meat issues during the 2024 presidential election, with the Trump campaign pouring money into a brutally effective attack ad declaring, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” During the executive order signing ceremony, Trump declared, “This was one of the big reasons that we all won.” He added later, “I want to thank Riley. She really has been in the forefront.”
Interviews with former teammates and competitors at the fateful 2022 championship, as well as a review of Gaines’ public statements, legal documents, nonprofit filings, and other records, reveal how she transformed herself from captain of a deeply troubled swim team to one of the leading conservative activists of her generation.
Today, Gaines serves as a real-life Regina George figure in the MAGA universe, with her online dustups receiving celebrity coverage in the right-wing press. A Fox News darling and social media bomb-thrower affiliated with some of the country’s most influential right-wing advocacy groups, she broadcasts the pictures and names of trans middle and high schoolers to her 1.6 million followers on X, encouraging younger athletes to boycott and shun trans competitors. For her, this cause is “spiritual warfare.” Meanwhile, she’s cashing in: Between recording sessions for her podcast, Gaines for Girls, she reps an anti-trans clothing line and slings a student debt refinancing plan, herbal supplements, and ivermectin. In 2024, she released a children’s book and a memoir. Her speaking fees run as high as $25,000.
By multiple measures, Gaines and her allies have largely prevailed in their original quest to rid women’s sports of trans athletes. Twenty-nine states have now banned trans girls and women from participating on the school sports teams that match their gender identity (though some of those bans are blocked as they work their way through the courts). And after Trump’s executive order, the NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee both changed their policies to categorically exclude trans women. But Gaines, who did not respond to interview requests and questions for this story, shows no signs of stopping. After all, sports is just a stepping stone to a more sweeping goal. “The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she told the New York Times last August. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Riley Gaines opens her 2024 memoir, Swimming Against the Current, with a formative experience from her childhood. When she was 8, she writes, her father, Brad, led her to the edge of an outdoor pool in the middle of winter and told her to jump in. “No shaking or chattering,” he commanded. She needed to learn “mental toughness.” As she grew up in a conservative Christian family in the suburbs of Nashville, the daughter of two college athletes, her father’s lesson served her well. Especially when she was recruited to swim at the University of Kentucky, a Division I school with a women’s swim team rising in the national rankings under a mercurial head coach, Lars Jorgensen.
Gaines was a repeat Tennessee state champion and had qualified for the Olympic trials at age 15. Despite such accomplishments, during her recruiting trip to campus, Jorgensen told her she was “okay” and “walk-on material,” she’d later tell a local sports reporter. She committed to UK anyway. “You could look at his comments as hurtful and mean, but I know it was just tough love,” she said. “He would trash talk you, but that was part of what makes this special for me.” During her first year, she writes, Jorgensen often called her a LOFT—for “lack of fucking talent.” But she was not offended. “He didn’t actually think I was a LOFT,” she explains in her book. “This was just his way of seeing how we liked to be motivated.”
Jorgensen “definitely had this cult of persona around him,” recalls Trinity Ward, a teammate one year behind Gaines. “When he was singing your praises, at least for me, it felt like you were on top of the world. And when it felt like you were disappointing him, that felt horrible.” Ward, as well as two more of Gaines’ teammates—who requested anonymity to avoid backlash from Gaines’ fans and followers—are speaking publicly for the first time. They say Jorgensen often screamed at swimmers, told them they weren’t worth coaching, and tried to force them to swim when sick or injured. According to a 2023 investigation by UK’s athletic compliance office obtained through a public records request, swimmers reported that “voluntary” practices weren’t really optional and that Jorgensen imposed grueling extra swims for transgressions. “We had a punishment where we had to swim with our snorkels for two hours and we weren’t allowed to stop,” one of Gaines’ teammates remembers. The NCAA eventually suspended Jorgensen for violating limits on practice hours.
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Ward maintained a friendship with Gaines, who she says was generous with her car and could party hard. Even when Ward, who is queer, started dating a woman, Gaines was “friendly and respectful.” Once, as they drove together to a team retreat, they chatted about their respective experiences of being raised in religious conservative families. It was the summer of 2021, Trump had recently left office, and Ward remembers Gaines saying she didn’t like Trump. “It’s been really weird to see [her] completely transform,” Ward says now. “If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump at CPAC, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy.’” Gaines, who was seen as one of Jorgensen’s favorites, seemed to weather the pressure on the team better than most. “I never saw Riley cry because of something Lars said,” Ward recalls. “I never saw her have like a mental breakdown or show that any of this was getting to her.” In her book, Gaines writes that, despite his “utter savagery,” Jorgensen “became, and still is, one of my best friends.”
[...] Thomas had competed on the men’s team at Penn for three years, winning three silver medals at the 2019 Ivy League Championships. She’d come out as transgender to her family and a friend after her first year of college but delayed her medical transition until after she completed her sophomore season. “I did HRT [hormone replacement therapy] knowing and accepting I might not swim again,” she told Sports Illustrated.
But when she returned to school after taking a year off during the Covid pandemic, she was eligible for the women’s team under NCAA policy, which at the time allowed transgender women to compete after 12 months of testosterone suppression. There was just one problem: She was winning. Her race times, though slower than before her transition, qualified her among the country’s best female swimmers that season.
[...] The next day, members of the UK team stood on the pool deck to cheer as Gaines lined up for the 200 freestyle. It was one of the team’s best shots at an NCAA title. But when the results appeared on the scoreboard, Gaines and Thomas had tied for fifth, at 1:43.40—a full 2.28 seconds slower than the first-place finisher. [...] The story of what happened next appeared five days later in the conservative Daily Wire. After tying her race, Gaines and the other swimmers went behind a curtain, preparing to take the podium. There, an NCAA official informed her that he had already given the fifth-place trophy to Thomas, Gaines recounted to the reporter. Her own fifth-place trophy would come in the mail. In the meantime, she could pose with the sixth-place trophy.
Gaines was indignant. “I told the guy, ‘I don’t think that’s right, and I don’t think that’s fair,’” she said. But the official insisted. “The more I thought about it, the more it fired me up,” she remembered. “Who are we trying to protect here?” Sharing the podium with Thomas, “aghast that no one was standing up for female swimmers,” changed the trajectory of Gaines’ life, she writes in her memoir. “I decided I was no longer willing to cower and lie.” In an interview years later, she’d say, “I thought of it as a tragedy. I thought to myself, no one, no girl, no woman should ever have to face” that “level of humiliation.” The Daily Wire article catapulted her into the feverish world of right-wing media. On March 28, 10 days after her race with Thomas, she appeared on the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show; on April 1, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn hosted Gaines on her podcast; on April 6 she was a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where Carlson lauded her for “bravery.” “I’m just fortunate enough to where I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky, whether that be from the athletic director all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen,” she told him.
As she made more media appearances, Gaines’ rhetoric grew sharper. In her initial Daily Wire interview, she’d said of Thomas: “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that, 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.” Yet by the following spring any empathy she once had for Thomas had vanished: “He is an arrogant, cheat who STOLE a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman,” she tweeted.
Soon the locker room became a central theme, as she accused the NCAA of having “forced” the swimmers to change with Thomas and allowing “any man” to walk in—though both the men’s and women’s locker rooms had been opened to the competitors at the women’s championship. “If you walked in and saw Lia and you didn’t want to be in there, you could walk next door to the other locker room, or go in the stall,” says one of Gaines’ teammates. Though a handful of swimmers at the meet also went public to say that Thomas’ presence in the locker room made them uncomfortable, Gaines’ version of the story was more lurid: “We turned around and there’s a 6-foot-4 biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia,” she told Fox News. “Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.”
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Gaines fit seamlessly with a right-wing strategy that dated back to 2015, when the Supreme Court recognized the right to same-sex marriage and when Christian conservatives, fearing they were losing the culture wars, began searching for issues to fire up their political base. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” Terry Schilling, the president of the socially conservative American Principles Project, later told the New York Times. His group polled voters on a range of messages and found that trans people in women’s sports struck a nerve, including among conservative Democrats and independents. Thus began an effort to transform the debate about trans athletes into a political lightning rod.
Then Gaines came along. Within weeks of the NCAAs, she started collaborating with the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group that would later bring her aboard as a spokeswoman. Its savvy operators helped her “understand the logistics of the political sphere as well as tools to increase my effectiveness in spreading my message,” she writes in her memoir. The month after the championship, she appeared in the Kentucky Legislature as the guest of a Republican state representative, successfully urging lawmakers to pass a trans sports ban over the governor’s veto. She would go on to testify for anti-trans bills in at least 10 statehouses and appear in ads for Republican candidates including Kristi Noem, Rand Paul, and Herschel Walker (as he fended off domestic violence allegations). Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign paid her, at one point, for “political strategy consulting.”
Online, she started to toe the line between earnest advocate and troll. She stirred up conflict with prominent female athletes who supported trans people in sports, including Megan Rapinoe and Brittney Griner, then reveled in the ensuing coverage. In speeches, she tried out a religious tone: “I feel like we’re in this battle of really spiritual warfare,” she said at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2023. “It’s no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.” In July 2023, the Fox-owned sports website OutKick announced the launch of the weekly podcast Gaines for Girls, whose first episode promised to expose “the truth about transgenders in women’s sports.” She would interview not only fellow anti-trans athletes, but also powerful anti-LGBTQ Republican lawmakers and officials, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and former Oklahoma public education superintendent Ryan Walters.
[...]
By early 2024, Gaines was preparing to take her fight to the legal arena in partnership with the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, a new nonprofit known as ICONS. Like Gaines’ activism, ICONS was born from the furor over Lia Thomas. Its founders—Arizona backstroke champion Marshi Smith and swim mom Kim Jones—have said that they were first introduced by Gaines herself in the spring of 2022, not long after the NCAA championship.
[...] Gaines v. NCAA is even more sweeping than the current Supreme Court cases. Rather than arguing over whether states can ban trans athletes from teams matching their gender identity, the case argues that trans girls and women must be banned from women’s sports, starting with the NCAA and Georgia. The case contends that “trans inclusion is sex discrimination against cisgender women,” summarizes Jess Braverman, legal director at Gender Justice, a Minnesota nonprofit. In September, a judge dismissed the claims against the Georgia state university system but allowed Gaines’ Title IX case against the NCAA to continue.
[...] With Donald Trump back in office, Gaines’ political influence has reached new heights. She recounted a story recently that highlighted her access to the new administration. Right after Trump’s inauguration, she contacted the incoming director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, with a complaint. Her husband, a British swimmer whom she had met at the University of Kentucky, had been unable to get a green card due to a requirement that he receive the Covid vaccine. Within a couple of days, Edlow’s office had dropped the requirement, which the immigration official confirmed personally while appearing as a guest on Gaines’ podcast. “It would be an absolute privilege to swear him in personally to be a citizen,” Edlow gushed. Meanwhile, Trump’s White House immediately started using its power to target trans athletes. Under President Joe Biden, the administration had interpreted Title IX to forbid discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Trump promptly reversed that policy. He signed his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order the day after ICONS filed its lawsuit against Penn. The day after that, the Education Department opened Title IX investigations into both Penn and San José State University, using the same arguments ICONS made in its legal cases. Soon, the administration announced it was withholding $175 million in federal funding for Penn over its trans athlete policy.
[...] As her clout within the MAGA universe grows, Gaines has expanded her repertoire beyond anti-trans advocacy. On her podcast, she now decries the gamut of right-wing bugaboos, from Planned Parenthood to the “deep state.” Nor is she the only Gaines making her presence known in politics. Her dad, Brad, is running for Congress in Tennessee. As of last June, she’d clocked 118 Fox News appearances since the NCAA championship, according to Media Matters. She’d appeared on the network nine times that month alone, amid an online skirmish with Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who had slammed Gaines on X for misgendering a transgender high schooler. “You’re truly sick,” Biles posted. “All of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser.” In response, Gaines posted a video of Biles testifying that she was sexually abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. “Simone Biles when she had to endure a predatory man Vs Simone Biles when other girls have to endure predatory men,” she quipped, equating trans women in sports to sexual abusers.
Mother Jones has a solid in-depth piece on how former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines turned her March 2022 5th place tie (and not being given such trophy in person) with trans swimmer Lia Thomas into a career of right-wing punditry, focusing primarily on anti-trans agitprop (with fighting trans sports inclusion in particular being her main focus).
Gaines hosts a weekly show, Gaines For Girls, on Outkick.
