Over the weekend, Olympian Simone Biles found herself in an unusual competition, facing off against former college athlete turned conservative political activist Riley Gaines in a war of words. The two found themselves in a heated debate on X about trans athletes in women’s sports, an argument that took the internet by storm.
Biles ripped into Gaines after the conservative pundit disparaged a championship-winning high school softball team, intentionally misgendering the team’s 17-year-old trans star pitcher. “You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race,” Biles wrote, referencing Gaines’s past as a D1 athlete. “Straight up sore loser.”
Biles, of course, is a world-famous gymnast with 11 Olympic medals to her name (seven gold, two silver, and two bronze). She has multiple gymnastics skills named after her and is the most decorated gymnast of all time, regardless of gender.
Gaines is…well, who is she? What race did she lose? And how did she wind up embroiled in a war of words with the greatest gymnast of all time? Here’s everything you need to know about Riley Gaines.
Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2000, Gaines is the daughter of two collegiate athletes, Brad and Telisha Gaines, a football player and a softball player, respectively. She was a multisport athlete who won a Little League championship as a child. But ultimately, she chose a different sport to pursue: competitive swimming. Gaines won the 100-yard butterfly and 100-yard freestyle in the TISCA High School Swimming & Diving State Championships in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2017. The year prior, she was invited to participate in her first US Olympic Trials in the 100 free, but failed to make the cut after finishing in 85th place.
Despite the setback, Gaines kept on swimming. For college, she was recruited to swim Division 1 at the University of Kentucky as the number two recruit out of Tennessee and number 98 overall in the class of 2018. There, she found a lot of success, making multiple All-SEC teams (that’s the Southeastern Conference, for the uninitiated) and racking up a fair number of SEC and NCAA accolades. She competed in the 2021 NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships, placing seventh in the 200 freestyle race but winning a silver medal in the 4 × 200-yard freestyle relay. She also qualified for the US Olympic Trials again in 2021 but did not compete.
In college, her highest-ranking individual event finish nationally was fifth place—reminder, that’s off the podium—in the NCAA WD1 Championship’s 200-yard freestyle final in March 2022. Despite Gaines’s failure to medal, 2022 was a good year for her both competitively and personally: She was named the 2022 SEC Women’s Swimming & Diving Scholar-Athlete of the Year; she married fellow University of Kentucky swimmer Louis Barker after some three years of dating; and she graduated with a degree in health sciences. She also retired from competitive swimming, having never competed professionally or participated in the Olympic Games. Her original aspiration was to attend dental school.
However, Gaines’s life trajectory would soon change after one fateful matchup at the end of her collegiate career. In March 2022, during the last meet of Gaines’s career, she tied with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place in the NCAA 200-yard freestyle championship. Thomas would go on to become the first openly trans woman to win an NCAA championship, after emerging victorious in the 500-yard freestyle. Thomas’s win added fuel to the fire regarding the ongoing national debate about trans women’s participation in women’s sports.
At first, Gaines was cordial about Thomas’s win and directed her ire at the NCAA. “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career…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,” she reportedly said in an interview with The Daily Wire. But eventually, Gaines did what many in her position have, pivoting to hawking right-wing conservative talking points and anti-trans rhetoric as her full-time job.
