Lia Thomas has dominated women’s college swimming this season—and has also become a lightning rod for controversy. Many—including some teammates—say she shouldn’t be able to compete against other women. In an exclusive interview with Sports Illustrated, Thomas explains why she has to.
Fresh off her final practice of the week, the most controversial athlete in America sat in the corner of a nearly empty Philadelphia coffeehouse with her back to the wall. Lia Thomas had done some of her best work this season while feeling cornered. On this January evening her long torso was wrapped in a University of Pennsylvania swim and dive jacket, her hair still damp from a swim—roughly three miles staring at the black line on the bottom of the pool. She looked exhausted.
As college students across the country were digging into their Friday nights, Thomas was thinking about her weekend plans: sleeping, studying and another grueling swim practice.This had been a season unlike any in her 22 years, and unlike any in the history of her sport.
The shy senior economics major from Austin became one of the most dominant college athletes in the country and, as a result, the center of a national debate—a living, breathing, real-time Rorschach test for how society views those who challenge conventions.
“I just want to show trans kids and younger trans athletes that they’re not alone,” she says at the coffeehouse. “They don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love.”
In her first year swimming for the Penn women’s team after three seasons competing against men, Thomas throttled her competition. She set pool, school and Ivy League records en route to becoming the nation’s most powerful female collegiate swimmer. Photos of Thomas resting at a pool wall and waiting for the rest of the field to finish have become a popular visual shorthand of her dominance.
When she swims at the NCAA Women’s Division I Swimming and Diving Championships, which begin March 16 in Atlanta, Thomas is a favorite to win individual titles in the 200- and 500-yard freestyle events, and also has a shot in the 100-yard freestyle. She has an outside chance to break longstanding collegiate records held by Katie Ledecky and Missy Franklin, two of the most beloved American Olympians of this century. Thomas says she has ambitions to compete beyond college, which could set her on a course to be Ledecky’s teammate at the 2024 Games in Paris—and perhaps challenge Ledecky’s Olympic records.“I don’t know exactly what the future of my swimming will look like after this year, but I would love to continue doing it,” Thomas says. “I want to swim and compete as who I am.”
A vocal faction wonders, though, whether her participation in women’s swimming is fair. In January, Michael Phelps said there needs to be an “even playing field” within the sport. The editor of Swimming World likened Thomas to “the doping-fueled athletes of East Germany and China” from past Olympic Games. Thomas’s story has also become a right-wing obsession, a regular topic of discussion on Fox News. Conservative opinion sites have called her a man and deadnamed her, purposely using the name she went by before transitioning. Her moves have been minutely tracked by the U.K.’s Daily Mail, including once with cruel detail about her habits in the women’s locker room provided by an anonymous teammate. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have also written about her.The attention directed at Thomas has widened to the rest of her team, which has become bitterly divided. Mike Schnur, Penn’s men’s and women’s coach, has received a litany of hateful emails. During a training trip early this year in Florida, the school’s swimmers were asked by coaches not to wear their school gear lest they make themselves targets. The university’s social media handlers have turned off comments on some posts that mention their star. Even USA Swimming has fielded calls from parents of youth swimmers, worried the next Lia Thomas might take over their pool.
“I’m a woman, just like anybody else on the team,” Thomas says. “I’ve always viewed myself as just a swimmer. It’s what I’ve done for so long; it’s what I love.” She’s not thinking about wins or records, she insists. “I get into the water every day and do my best.”
This season left Thomas feeling both liberated and besieged. While she hopes her presence on the starting block helps other young trans athletes realize their possibilities, Thomas has walled herself off. Her only public comments this season have been on video with the swimming-news website SwimSwam and in extensive January sit-downs with Sports Illustrated. (During her two meetings with SI, Thomas brought Schuyler Bailar—a former Harvard swimmer and the first-known openly transgender D-I athlete—and asked that they be allowed to simultaneously record the conversations.) Her words are clipped, her pauses a calculation of potential reactions her comments might elicit.
Thomas has been threatened and called so many names online that she turned off some direct messaging on her Instagram. She avoids mentions of her name online, especially comment sections. She told her parents not to engage in the fight. She asked her friends to stand down. She won’t criticize teammates she knows are rooting against her. “I don’t look into the negativity and the hate,” she says. “I am here to swim.”Every day this season felt like a challenge to her humanity. Part of her wanted people to know her journey to this moment, to know what it felt like to be in a body but not be of that body. She wanted people to know what it was like to finally live an authentic life and what it meant for her to finish a race, to look up at a timing board and see the name lia thomas next to the names of other women. What it meant to her to stand on a podium with other women and be counted as an equal.
She wondered whether anyone would hear her words. Even if they did, would they listen?Though Thomas had been an elite distance swimmer throughout high school and could have joined much more prominent swim programs, Penn was the only place she wanted to go. Her brother Wes swam for the Quakers for four years; as a teenager Thomas often traveled to Philadelphia to watch him. She liked Schnur, Penn’s longtime coach, and the two quickly developed a bond after Thomas arrived on campus late in the summer of 2017.
Thomas became quick friends with many of her new teammates, connecting over a mutual love of niche anime and video games and through the closeness that can be achieved only through taxing swim practices. The hours back and forth in the pool created a kinship, and the work paid off. During her freshman year on the men’s team Thomas established several personal records. In her first Ivy League championships, in February 2018, she had top-eight finishes in the 500-yard freestyle, the 1,000-yard freestyle and the 1,650-yard freestyle.Thomas says she began questioning her identity near the end of her time at Austin’s Westlake High School. “I felt off,” she remembers, “disconnected with my body.” She finds it hard to explain the feelings creeping into her mind at that time, only that she began to have concerns about how she viewed herself—feelings that would emerge more and more often as she competed in her first college season.
She Googled those feelings and read the personal stories of trans women. She was paired with a trans mentor through a group on Penn’s campus. That was the first time Thomas talked to someone who’d experienced what she was feeling. Those were light-bulb moments. “Like, Wow, this is such a close mirror of what I’m feeling,” she remembers. “It started to make more sense.” Though she’d found slivers of clarity, the joy of discovery began to feel like a psychological yoke to Thomas. How would her parents and friends feel about this? What would her coaches say?She told her brother the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, and he was immediately accepting. She called her parents. Bob and Carrie Thomas could feel that something was off that first year of college, that their child was hurting. Bob says what was discussed on that call is personal, but that he and Carrie told their daughter they loved and supported her. “We will do everything and anything we need to do to have Lia be part of this family,” Bob says. “We were not going to lose her.”
The 2018–19 season proved to be Thomas’s best yet. She earned second-place finishes in the same trio of Ivy championship races in which she’d excelled the previous year, earning her multiple spots on the All-Ivy team. Thomas got closer to her goal of swimming at the NCAA championships and perhaps qualifying for the ’20 Olympic trials. In just two years she’d proved to be a quiet leader—a no-complaints workhorse who kept a steady pace in practice and flipped the switch in competition.She had never felt more miserable.
Though she’d come out to herself and to her family, her feelings of dysphoria heightened that second year in school, particularly after the swim season. With fewer demands on her time, she sank into her thoughts. “I was very depressed,” Thomas says. She trained less often and felt disengaged from her life. “I got to the point where I couldn’t go to school. I was missing classes,” she says. “My sleep schedule was super messed up. Some days I couldn’t get out of bed. I knew at that moment I needed to do something to address this.”
Her friends in the program could see her struggling, but they didn’t know why. Thomas was still months from coming out to her team and coaches. She’d do her best to smile and make it seem like life was O.K. The others noticed. “It’s scary seeing someone you love hurting and not being able to help,” says Andie Myers, who joined the program at the same time as Thomas and is one of her closest friends. “She wasn’t talking about what was going on in her life, but it seemed like she wanted to say something. It was a completely helpless feeling.”
Thomas would wake up and think about the people who might reject her. At the pool, she’d stare at the black line and absorb herself in self-doubt. “I tried my best to inch closer to coming out to close friends, a couple of coaches,” she says. “But in that depressive, very struggling state of mind, it’s hard to make progress when so much of my energy was trying to get through each day.” At one practice, Thomas had a panic attack in the pool and bolted. “I was too scared to tell Mike why,” she says of her coach.
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