Last week, Lia Thomas set a new pool record in the 500 free during the Ivy League championship held at Harvard. In case you missed the race, here’s the end of it.

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Lia Thomas is the @IvyLeague champion in the 500 free. Her time of 4:37.32 is a new pool record.

Catherine Buroker finishes in second.#FightOnPenn pic.twitter.com/ki2SQdxn6Q

— Penn Swimming & Diving (@PennSwimDive) February 17, 2022

This dominating performance came a couple of weeks after 16 of Thomas’s own teammates wrote a letter saying Thomas shouldn’t be allowed to compete. But the letter was anonymous. No one wanted to be individually identified as saying what Thomas was doing was unfair.

The NCAA announced that individual sports could set their own rules about who is allowed to compete. U.S.A. Swimming subsequently put forward stricter rules about trans athletes but the NCAA said it would be unfair to implement those rules in the middle of the season so Lia Thomas continues to break records in women’s events.

Yesterday, Suzy Weiss wrote a piece about the Ivy League championships and what the parents and other competitors who attended were saying (and not saying) about Lia Thomas:

One Penn dad, whose daughter swims against Thomas in distance events, tells me he places the blame “squarely on the NCAA.” His wife chimes in: “The NCAA has done biological women, and her, wrong and they need to fix it.” A Brown dad says the NCAA ruling adds up to “weasel words.” A Princeton dad tells me that “either the people supporting this are on the wrong side of history, or it’s the end of women’s swimming.”…

When Thomas won the 500 free, I started chatting with a security guard. What did he think when she won? “Speechless,” he said. “Just speechless.” What did he think the solution was? Will the league change course? “Nothing will change. This is Harvard. There’s no controversy. No racists,” he said. Then, with a wink, “Everyone is equal.”

But no one Weiss spoke to wanted to go on the record. Indeed some of them begged her not to let their names mentioned in the story.

One mom told me that she was happy that Lia gets to compete as her true self, before changing her mind and insisting that I delete my recording of our interview. After I spoke to one dad, his wife contacted me begging to take his name off the record. She thought that the consequences for speaking would be “severe” and texted: “Please don’t hurt my child!” …

The parents say their daughters know it’s wrong that Thomas is swimming against them but that they will not risk getting smeared with the label transphobe.

Summing up the mood, another Penn parent told Weiss, “Everyone’s just faking everything.” And really, can you blame them? The people Thomas is competing with aren’t only worried about winning a race. All of them are Ivy League students with bright futures. And they’re smart enough to know there could be serious social consequences for speaking up. Indeed it could be catastrophic for their futures either immediately or years from now when activists decide to use it against them at some critical moment.

And that’s why Lia Thomas keeps winning. Because all of the adults who know this is unfair, from the NCAA down to the parents in the stands, are afraid to be smeared for stating the obvious. Better to lose by a length of the pool in some farce of a swim meet than to risk losing everything.