In May 2024, claims spread across X that U.S. women’s Olympians had threatened to quit over former NCAA swimmer Lia Thomas trying out for a spot on the team. Thomas, a transgender woman, become the first known trans athlete to win a Division I national championship in any sport in March 2022.
“The US Women’s team has made it clear that they will resign immediately if the Olympic Committee allows Lia Thomas to try out,” one post on the social platform claimed.
We previously looked into this claim in July 2023, after the story was first published by the satire website The Dunning-Kruger Times — part of the America’s Last Line of Defense network of sites. It began:
US Women’s Team Says They’ll All Quit If Lia Thomas Gets a Tryout: “We Don’t Need a Ringer”
The 16 members of the US National Women’s Team say they’ll all quit if Lia Thomas, the transgender swimmer who won the NCAA Championship and set 11 world records, gets so much as a tryout.
“None of these women want to spend their locker room time looking at male genitals just for an advantage,” said Coach Joe Barron, “they’d rather win honestly than to have a ringer on the team.”
The story included a picture of the U.S. women’s volleyball team and referred to a nonexistent coach.
A number of social media users, however, appeared to believe the story was true. “About bloody time! Woman defending other woman!” one user wrote on X in early 2024.
When the claim first spread in 2023, USA Today found that a screenshot of the story without a satire label was being shared by numerous accounts, including a local chapter of the Wisconsin Republicans.
At the time of this publication, the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials — which will decide the team of athletes that will represent the U.S. in pool swimming events in 2024 — hadn’t been held yet, scheduled to take place from June 15 to 23, 2024. Only two female athletes had qualified for open-water swimming events: Katie Grimes and Mariah Denigan. No athletes had been named to the artistic swimming team.
Thomas, who began her college career competing for the University of Pennsylvania women’s team in 2021, won the NCAA championship in the 500-yard freestyle in May 2022 — and became a lightning rod for anti-trans rhetoric. Although some critics claimed she had an “unfair advantage” in women’s races, an analysis of her times by The Independent showed she was slower than numerous previous champions, including Katie Ledecky.
Thomas has not competed since 2022 because of a change in policy by the group that governs the sport of swimming. She began a legal challenge of that World Aquatics rule in January 2024.
We’ve previously fact-checked other claims about Thomas, including that she was considering retirement after her medals were taken away and that she had been banned from the Olympics.
