I hope that by now you've heard Alysa Liu's story. After winning two world championships by the time she was 14 years old, she quit figure skating because she had come to hate it. When she returned to the sport two years later, she had figured out that it wasn't the sport she hated, but the way it had been used to control her life. So she laid down some new ground rules. They boiled down to "I'm in charge now." And it wasn't all about what happened on the ice. She said, "No one's going to starve me, or tell me what I can and can't eat."
While it's clear that Alysa doesn't want to wallow in the past, she was literally told that she couldn't drink water. As she said during an interview with Rolling Stone, "They were like, ‘Oh water weight, you shouldn’t drink water. You should gargle it.'" That's crazy!
Huge kudos to Alysa for breaking out of that kind of abuse. But it brings up the reality of what seems to happen a lot in women's sports.
Due to MAGA and their media outlets, you'd think that the most important topic in women's sports is the one about getting rid of trans women - who they claim pose a threat. The leader of that charge is a young woman named Riley Gaines, who tied for 5th place in an NCAA swim meet against a trans woman.
Riley started her campaign against trans athletes by suggesting that they shouldn't compete in women's sports. That's something we could have a discussion about. But it eventually moved into a claim that merely sharing a locker room with a trans woman amounted to sexual abuse. She even had the gall to compare her experience to the abuse suffered by Simone Biles at the hands of Larry Nassar.
Simone Biles when she had to endure a predatory man
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) June 7, 2025
Vs
Simone Biles when other girls have to endure predatory men pic.twitter.com/8p9D51seYr
In defending that tweet, Riley said this about her experience with a trans woman in the locker room, "What me and my teammates had to go through was certainly sexual abuse.”
What you might not know is that Riley's coach at the time was a man named Lars Jorgensen. He was initially suspended from coaching for "exceeding maximum practice hours for nearly three years, including not providing required weekly days off or required flex days off." But here's how Riley's teammates described a deeper issue.
Swimmers say Jorgensen mocked teammates’ weight and pressured them to lower their body fat percentage to extremes. “Lars is the biggest reason that an alarming number of the Women’s Swim Team suffers from Eating Disorders,” one former swimmer wrote to UK officials. “The damage from Lars’ words and remarks about female bodies last long beyond the four years of collegiate swimming.”
But it gets worse. Jorgensen is also facing civil suits by at least two former staff members who have accused him of rape. This was all happening while Riley Gaines was on Jorgensen's swim team. She obviously knew about his practice schedule and the way he treated her teammates. It's unclear whether, at the time, she knew about the sexual abuse. But she does now.
Rather than speaking out against coaches who starve female athletes or rape them, Riley is still suggesting that protecting women in sports is all about denying trans women the right to compete. A cynical person might question whether she's a tool being used to distract us from the real abuse that's going on.
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