Former NCAA swimming champion Riley Gaines is blasting tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams for their silence over the debate about men claiming to be transgender “women” competing in women’s sports and says the tennis stars are afraid to speak up in the face of the “cancel culture.”
“Women are depending, girls are depending on these women with platforms and with influence to take a stance on this, so changes can ultimately be made,” Gaines said Thursday on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co.
Gaines’ accusation comes on the heels of her effort to get well-known female athletes to go on record about transgender athletes after she tweeted on Monday that she would begin tagging famous athletes on social media.
Please tag them so it can’t be ignored! Again, the silence is deafening.
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) May 8, 2023
“I could understand last year, around this time before the Lia Thomas incident really brought this to prominence, I can understand they have sponsorships, that they’re scared of this cancel culture,” Gaines added. “But now, a year past that incident, I don’t have sympathy for that anymore.”
“They have come out before, and they have acknowledged the differences between men and women, especially when it comes to tennis,” Gaines continued. “And I think it’s worth noting that both Venus and Serena Williams lost in a blowout to the 203rd-ranked male tennis player.”
“I think this will get worse before it gets better,” Gaines told Fox News Digital in a separate interview. “How many girls have to be injured playing against a male? How many girls have to lose out on scholarships and trophies and titles? How many girls have to feel violated in the locker room?”
Gaines’ pinpointing of the Williams sisters is germane to the topic because both Venus and her famous sister Serena have already been involved in a game that shows the disparity between the level women play and the caliber of play men can reach. In 1998, the two sisters played an exhibition game with male tennis player Karsten Braasch.
The male player was already past his prime playing years at 31 years of age and, at the time, was ranked World No. 203 male player. But when the Williams sisters brashly claimed that they could beat any male player ranked in the top 200 players, Braasch stepped up and played the girls. And he wallopped them.
Braasch first beat Serena 6-1 in a single-set, winner-takes-all game. And when it was time for Venus to face him, Braasch trounced her 6-2. Even as a lowly 203-ranked player, it turned out that he was just faster and could hit harder than the spry young girls. As good as the girls were, they couldn’t even beat a man who was never exactly a contender.
Venus Williams and her new truth might seem to be a different “truth” than what she experienced in 1998. But it is also different than the one her own sister Serena was offering fans back in August of 2013 when she appeared on the David Letterman Show and admitted that even as a top world women’s tennis player, she could not beat men’s tennis star, Andy Murray.
Serena Williams told Letterman that she heard tennis star Andy Murray “joking” about having a match against Williams. But Williams was not a big fan of the idea.
“Andy, seriously. Like, are you kidding me?” she said about the idea. “For me, men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely almost two separate sports.”
“So, if I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose, 6-0, 6-0, in 5 to 6 minutes, maybe 10 minutes,” Williams said.
“No, it’s true,” she added when Letterman tried to protest, “it’s a completely different sport. Men are a lot faster, and they serve harder and hit harder, it’s just a different game, and I only want to play girls, I don’t want to be embarrassed… So, Andy, I’m not going to let you kill me.”
In reply, Letterman joked that he only wanted to “play girls,” too.
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Both Venus and Serena should have learned the lesson that men and women simply don’t play the same game, and even with their personal experience, they should be opponents of transgender athletes playing as women.
So, maybe Gaines is right? They are just afraid of the cancel culture.
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