2022-04-09
17 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemita Basu.
U Penn swimmer Leah Thomas was having a pretty good season, but it wasn't until a competition in December that she sudd blew up in national headlines.
There were videos of her, you know, racing far ahead, went viral, and she posted the top times in the year in two events, and suddenly everybody was paying attention.
That's Louisa Thomas, a staff writer at the New Yorker.
No relation to Leah Thomas, by the way.
Louisa covers sports, and she recently wrote about Lia Thomas college swimming career and the larger debate over transgender athletes participating in elite sports.
See, Leah Thomas is a trans woman.
When she first got to Penn, she hadn't yet transitioned.
She was competing with the men's swimming team and was by all accounts, very accomplished.
She finished second in three events of the Ivy Championships, broke a pool record.
I mean, she was a very, very.
Good swimmer, but mentally, she was struggling.
Her sense of herself and her body really didn't align.
Leah ultimately came out to her coaches and her teammates as trans, and she underwent hormone replacement therapy.
Two years later, she returned to the pool with the women's team.
Luisa told us there have been a lot of misconceptions about Leah.
Sure, she is fast, but she's not the fastest there ever was.
There was this kind of immediate, like, desire to leap to the conclusion that Leah had already won everything.
They were talking about how inevitable it was that she was going to be breaking Katie Ledecky's records and Missy Franklin's records.