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.”
Lia Thomas (right) and fellow medalists Pennsylvania’s Catherine Buroker (center) and Prinnceton’s Ellie Marquardt (left) celebrating wins – 500y freestyle race – 2022 Ivy League Swimming Championships (Photo by Kathryn Riley/Getty Images).
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?
Even if they did, would they listen?
Thomas asked family and friends not to engage with the vitriol she faced. “I am here to swim,” she says.
Donald Miralle/Sports Illustrated
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.
Credit: Sports Illustrated
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