Until sanity is restored in our country, records will show that Lia Thomas was the winner of the 2022 women’s NCAA 500-yard freestyle event. However, we all know the story behind Thomas by now. Lia is not a woman, but a man identifying as a woman. Anyone interested in the sanctity of competition, biological integrity, and saving women’s sports, should celebrate Emma Weyant, the actual woman who won the 2022 women’s NCAA 500-yard freestyle event on Thursday night.
The records will show that Weyant finished in second place behind Thomas. But Weyant is the actual she who should be recognized as champion. Thomas’s victory represents everything that detractors feared would happen in the national championships: that females would not be able to compete against a man claiming to be a woman.
Consider that Weyant was on the 2020 U.S. Olympic team and still lost to Thomas by nearly two seconds — an eternity in swimming.
Earlier, in the prelims, Thomas knocked off another Olympian, Reka Gyorgy of Virginia Tech. Gyorgy was a member of the 2016 Hungarian Olympic team. She finished 17th, and Thomas finished 1st. But, because only the top 16 advanced to the finals, Thomas’s presence in the field prevented Gyorgy from advancing. It was her last opportunity to compete in the NCAA.
It’s not as if Thomas is a swimming phenom. Thomas swam on the men’s team for three years and did not even come close to competing at the NCAA national championships. Now, Thomas is defeating female Olympians. This is not fair. This is not sport. This is cheating. Thomas has a biological advantage over every female athlete in the competition. Weyant was the first victim of the LGBT mob at the NCAA championships. It begs the question: If Olympians cannot compete with Thomas, how are other female swimmers supposed to?
Jeri Shanteau, an 11-time NCAA All-American swimmer, is not surprised by Thomas’s dominance, given that Thomas is male. Shanteau shared her thoughts with me in an interview conducted after the Ivy League swimming championships.
Thomas’s performances “were exactly what I would have assumed that they would be,” Shanteau told me. “They were faster than the biological women [Thomas] was racing against, and the women that had to go up against [Thomas] were at an unfair disadvantage before the race began.”
“We carved out female athletics for a very specific reason,” she said. “We knew long ago. Fifty years ago this summer, Title IX was enacted for sports, that we needed to carve out a women’s category because a boy goes through male puberty, their male advantage stays with them their entire lifetime,” Shanteau said. “So, we carved out female sports for that reason.”
Given her excellence and experience as an NCAA female swimmer, I asked Shanteau if there was anything women could do in their training that could allow them to compete against a swimmer born a male, such as Thomas.
“No,” Shanteau said. “There is a biological advantage that men do after puberty that no matter what a woman does, she cannot consistently and fairly compete with men.”
“I trained with the most elite men on the planet. I was one of the most elite. I was top five in the world,” Shanteau said. “I was also training with top five men in the world, day in and day out. When it came to competition, no, absolutely not. There is nothing a woman can do that would be equal to a man’s biological makeup to make them competing against each other, fair, ever.”
Weyant lost the race against Thomas before she even set foot in the pool. Just as Shanteau pointed out, Weyant had a biological disadvantage. Thomas will always have an asterisk by his name. No matter what the results show, Weyant is the real 2022 women’s NCAA 500-yard women champion. No amount of wokeness, mob intimidation, or propaganda will ever change that.
