Riley Gaines Woman of The Year – AMAC Magazine Exclusive

Riley Gaines was a star in her chosen field long before she was a household name. The former University of Kentucky swimmer was a twelve-time All-American, five-time SEC Champion, and two-time Olympic trials qualifier. But it wasn’t until 2022 when she broke on to the national political scene and redefined the debate about biological men competing in women’s sports.

Famously, Gaines tied University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place at the NCAA women’s swimming championship in 2022 in the 200-meter freestyle. Thomas, a male who identifies as a woman, had been permitted by the NCAA to compete against female swimmers. While Thomas had previously ranked 462nd nationally in the men’s division, he instantly became one of the top-ranked swimmers in the country after switching to the women’s division.

After that defining NCAA championship swim, the judges handed the fifth-place trophy to Lia and promised Gaines that she would “get one in the mail.” Months later, she still hadn’t received anything.

“I looked up and I also saw a No. 5 by Lia’s name, so in that moment I realized we tied,” Gaines shared with Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) in a 2022 interview. “It was a flood of emotions, really. I was extremely happy for the girls above me who conquered what was seemingly impossible by beating Lia, and it was kind of an array of emotions. I was shocked, really.”

From that life-changing moment, Riley Gaines embarked on an improbable path that has led her to become the nation’s leading advocate for defending the integrity of women’s sports.

Because few figures have embodied the courage and spirit of the current pushback against the excesses of the radical left more fiercely than Gaines, she has been voted by AMAC members as AMAC’s person of the year.

Gaines recounted her alarm when the NCAA also began to designate locker rooms as “unisex”—allowing female-identifying males to legally enter private spaces previously reserved for women. “It felt like belittlement, and it felt like betrayal,” Gaines recalled of the change in an interview to Liberty University’s student newspaper.

After those experiences, Gaines realized she’d had enough.

“Up until this point, I was waiting for a coach, or another swimmer, or a parent, or someone with political power, or someone within the NCAA, or someone who was supposed to be protecting us . . . to protect us. But then it really hit me. If we as female athletes weren’t willing to stick up for ourselves, how could we expect someone else to stick up for us?”

In the months since Gaines ended her swimming career and graduated from the University of Kentucky, she has ascended as a champion of women’s sports and the values of fairness and competitiveness while also establishing her national profile as an icon for the rights, safety, privacy, and dignity of female athletes.

Naturally, Gaines’s public opposition to the left’s cult of gender ideology has made her the target of relentless smears, attacks, and even physical assault from the left. Following a Turning Point USA event at San Francisco State University in April 2023, Gaines says she was “ambushed and cornered” by pro-trans activists before one “struck” her repeatedly—a jarring reminder of the left’s embrace of political violence when its views are contested.

Since her NCAA snub nearly two years ago, Gaines has toured the nation to tell her story and speak about the crucial importance of protecting women’s spaces, as well as the importance of free speech on college campuses. She has encouraged other female athletes to come forward and defend their rights and dignity as well, warning that radical gender ideology continues to pose an existential threat to the future of women’s sports.

Gaines has also testified before Congress, appeared on major cable news shows, and is now officially affiliated with conservative groups like the Independent Women’s Forum. She also hosts “Gaines for Girls,” a weekly OutKick podcast in which she discusses America’s accelerating cultural decline.

Additionally, in August of 2023, she opened the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute, which “identifies and recruits those targeted by the left” and “trains them to fearlessly, relentlessly, and eloquently defend America’s founding principles and to become powerhouse leaders who work in positions of influence to keep America true to those principles.”

“The thing I’ve learned the most throughout all of this is to use your voice,” Gaines said to Senator Blackburn in the weeks following her competition against Thomas. “Before I said anything publicly a couple weeks ago, with myself being the first or second to protest this, I have realized there are so many girls who feel the exact same way as I do but are told they can’t say anything, or they’re scared because today’s culture is ‘cancel culture’ and they don’t want to risk their future in athletics or future career. There are so many things that can be taken down with it.”

She continued: “But what I’ve realized is if we want a change, you have to use your voice. We have to let people know as a group that a majority of us female athletes—or females in general—are not okay with this. We’re not okay with the trajectory of how this is going or how it could end up in a couple years.”

As the left continues its war on biological reality, the act of simply stating once widely known truths—as Gaines has done for the better part of two years—has become heroic.

For the sake of women’s sports, women’s rights, and the God-given dignity of every human person, every American should hope that other young women will follow Gaines’s lead and heroically use their voices to restore reason, order, and common sense to our culture.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.