Simone Biles first attacked Riley Gaines personally after Gaines criticized a Minnesota high-school softball team with a transgender player. Four days later, Biles apologized for making it personal and clarified that her objection was to publicly singling out a young athlete—not to dismissing the debate over fairness in women’s sports.
What prompted Biles to respond?
On June 6, 2025, former collegiate swimmer and activist Riley Gaines commented on a Minnesota State High School League post celebrating Champlin Park High School’s girls’ softball team, which had won the state championship. Gaines wrote “Comments off lol” and called the team’s star player “a boy,” according to BBC Sport and The Guardian. The Guardian reported that one member of the team was a transgender girl and that a coach described her as a good teammate supported by her teammates. Champlin Park won the Class 4A title game 6–0, the Guardian reported.
What did Simone Biles say in her first reply?
Biles, an Olympic gymnast, replied to Gaines on X. BBC Sport reported that Biles wrote: “You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser.” She also urged Gaines to support the trans community or find another way for transgender athletes to participate safely, floated the idea of a transgender category across sports, and taunted Gaines to pick on someone her own size. Those were Biles’s initial remarks, not her final explanation.
Gaines called Biles’s position disappointing and maintained that men should not compete in women’s sports, according to the Guardian’s account of the exchange.
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Which race was Biles referring to?
Biles’s “lost a race” line referred to the 2022 NCAA Championships, where Gaines and Lia Thomas tied for fifth in the 200-meter freestyle. BBC Sport and the Guardian reported the result while covering the 2025 exchange. It identifies the competition Biles invoked; the result by itself does not establish Gaines’s motive for speaking about sports policy.
Why did Biles apologize?
In a June 10 follow-up, Biles said that competitive equity and inclusion both mattered, but that the existing system did not adequately balance them. She apologized for making the dispute personal, saying, “It didn’t help for me to get personal with Riley,” as quoted by the Associated Press.
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Biles clarified that her main objection was the public targeting of an underage athlete who did not set the rules. She said sports organizations should address the policy question by creating rules that include transgender athletes while maintaining fair competition: “I believe sports organizations have a responsibility to come up with rules supporting inclusion while maintaining fair competition,” the Associated Press reported.
Gaines accepted the apology for the personal attacks while continuing to disagree with Biles on policy. The Los Angeles Times quoted her saying, “I accept Simone’s apology for the personal attacks including the ones where she body-shamed me.”
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What were the two sides disagreeing about?
The exchange involved both a policy disagreement and a dispute over how to treat the young athlete at the center of the post. Biles’s follow-up framed the rules question as a balance between inclusion and competitive equity, while Gaines maintained that men should not compete in women’s sports. Separately, Biles said public criticism should be directed at the organizations that set eligibility rules rather than at a child who does not control them.
The reporting establishes what the two women said in this exchange; it does not settle the wider sports-policy debate or establish a single eligibility rule that applies across sports and governing bodies.
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