Sports are hard. Losing is harder. Losing is a part of sports. I try to operate u see the standard that losing alone doesn’t make you a loser. I ran track, cross-country and wrestled in high school, I played baseball and soccer up through seventh grade. I lost a lot. I probably won a little more than I lost, overall, but god did I lose a lot. Losing in individual sports is hard because you’re out there alone to lose by yourself. You can’t blame anybody else. I’d like to think it builds character and teaches lessons. I also tend to think there are less painful ways to do that.

Riley Gaines was a swimmer, a sport that can be as lonely as wrestling or running. You’re in the pool by yourself. Riley Gaines was very good at swimming, and she won a lot. The television screen says she was an SEC champion, and well, that’s pretty great. She finished tied for fifth at the NCAA Championships in the 200 yard freestyle, quite an achievement. Gaines was certainly better at swimming than 99.9% of people are at anything in their lives. If she said that, well, there would be no denying that.

You see though, Riley feels aggrieved. She finished tied with Lia Thomas, a transgender female who swam for the University of Pennsylvania. The NCAA gave the 5th place trophy there on location to Thomas and mailed Gaines her trophy. She still finished fifth, and she eventually got the trophy, I assume. But you know, her feelings. So she start going around and complaining about Lia Thomas being able to compete. Riley doesn’t think trans women should be in women’s sports. The point of my post isn’t to argue and fight about that point, as while I do have concerns about this in combat sports and from a pure fairness angle, I have literally zero expertise on the matter and won’t pretend to know what’s fair and right here. I do know this though- if Lia Thomas wasn’t in the race, if she didn’t even exist, Riley Gaines still would not have won the race. In fact, as I assume it, she would have finished fifth by herself. She would have received the same fifth place trophy, just she would have received it that day. She still would have lost to four other girls. She’s just decided to make it her cause to make sure there’s never anywhere for trans women to compete.

Simone Biles backed off of her attacks on Riley Gaines over the weekend, but I won’t go so easy. Riley Gaines lost a race, quit her sport forever, and cashed in on attacking transgender women. If this were her only cause she had taken up since, I might take it for some sincere issue that mattered to her. It hasn’t been her only issue though. She’s become a pro-life spokeswoman as well, and a surrogate for Trump’s 2024 campaign. Riley Gaines is basically a right-wing hack who happened to finish fifth place in a race once, and now runs around like she finished second to a transgender woman who robbed her of her hard work. She would have finished fifth in that race, regardless. I wonder how many people she has made feel small and unseen by using her considerable talents for this. She may be right, she may be wrong on the merits of her message about the issue. She definitely used this cause to cash in and gain fame and fortune that she probably wouldn’t have gained in the pool.

I hope she’s happy.