Riley Gaines, the University of Kentucky 12-time NCAA All-America swimmer on its women’s team who has forthrightly denounced men in women’s sports, endorsed Georgia GOP senatorial candidate Herschel Walker in a new ad noting Walker’s opponent, Raphael Warnock, voted down an amendment that would keep men out of women’s college sports.
In the ad supporting Walker, Gaines introduces herself as a 12-time NCAA All-American.
“For more than a decade, I worked so hard; 4 a.m. practices to be the best. But my senior year I was forced to compete against a biological male,” she states.
“That’s unfair and wrong,” Walker declares.
“A man won the swimming title that belonged to a woman. And Senator Warnock voted to let it happen,” Gaines notes as the screen flashes, “Raphael Warnock voted to allow biological men to compete in women’s college sports.”
“Warnock’s afraid to stand up for female athletes,” Walker pronounces.
“Herschel Walker stands up for what’s right,” Gaines concludes.
A new ad from @HerschelWalker stars Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines who was forced to compete in this year’s NCAA swimming championships against a man identifying as a woman. Watch it: pic.twitter.com/CIEtHaZZJS
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 21, 2022
Gaines, who stands all of 5’5”, was infamously denied her fifth-place trophy at the NCAA championships last March when she was told she would have to hold the sixth-place trophy because biological male Lia Thomas, 6’1”, with whom she tied for fifth place, would be given the fifth-place trophy.
“I just want you to know that we respect you and admire your swim so much, but we just want Lia to hold the fifth place trophy,” the man instructed Gaines, she recalled to The Daily Wire.
“The more I thought about it, the more it fired me up,” she said. “It’s almost like the NCAA is trying to save face by giving Lia the fifth place trophy. Who are we trying to protect here and who are we trying to fight for here?”
“I like to stay true to what I believe in, and I’m not someone who’s just going to back down from anything or agree with something I don’t agree with,” she said. “If this was something other athletes weren’t going to step up and speak up about, I guess I could be that person.”
“What I’m not OK with is that they were able to just turn their backs on all of the biological females, not even just in swimming, but in all NCAA sports, just to kind of appease a small minority,” she concluded.
Notably, Thomas, from the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team, utterly crushed the female competition at the 2021 University of Akron’s Zippy Invitational — winning the 1650 free by a gargantuan 38 seconds ahead of the young woman finishing second. Thomas also won the 500 free by a whopping twelve seconds ahead of the woman who finished second, and won the 200 free by a still-huge seven seconds, setting new Penn records along with meet and pool records.
Video surfaced of Thomas winning the 1650 free, showing how lopsided the race was with Thomas, who swam competitively for the men’s team for three years before switching to the women’s team, leaving female swimmers looking as if they were not even in the same race.
Just to show you how absurd this is. Here’s the trans swimmer “Lia” Thomas crushing all of the female competitors by 40 seconds. This is what that looks like in real time. A total farce.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 15, 2021