Who is Cynthia Monteleone? Ex-track star says trans athletes will end women's sports
US world champion track runner Cynthia Monteleone has called out athletes assigned male at birth competing against women, saying that "if male-bodied athletes continue competing on female teams, it will be the end of women’s sports." The discussion stems from the controversy surrounding transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, 22, competing at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been shattering women’s records at the school. Thomas competed for three years at Penn as a man, Will Thomas, before her transition.
At a meet on November 20 last year, Thomas had a 1:43:47 time in the 200-meter freestyle and 4:35:06 in the 500-meter freestyle. These times, which were records for Penn, would have placed Thomas second and third, respectively in the NCAA Women’s Championships. Thomas breaking women’s records has rekindled a debate about how fair it is when people who are born as men compete as women, whether it be on the field, the court, the track or in the pool.
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Who is Cynthia Monteleone?
Monteleone is a former professional track athlete who has won world championships in track and field, 400 meters world championships and has also represented Team USA in the Masters competition. She defeated transgender runner Yanelle Del Mar Zape at the 2018 World Masters Athletics Championships and took first place. She is now speaking out against the new rules after her daughter, Margaret, experienced what her mother called the "demoralizing trend of male-bodied athletes displacing females from their own competitions".
"A year and a half after my experience in Spain, my daughter lost to a biological male identifying as female in her first-ever high school track race. I had watched proudly as my strong and determined girl did all the right things – made personal, difficult sacrifices to train her body to be as fast and fit as possible for her first race," she said. "Yet all her hard work seemed to drift away along with the male-bodied athlete, who had just transferred from the boys’ volleyball team to the girl’s team the season before. The athlete breezed right by her to win first place, leaving her to finish second."
In an earlier interview with Tucker Carlson, Monteleone had said that Margaret "had to line up for her very first race, after training all year, along a biological male," who, according to Monteleone, "'blew everybody away in the first 100 meters' despite having trained for only two weeks prior to the meet." "She deserved to win. She put in the work. But she had no chance because of the biological advantage of this male-bodied athlete," she said.
Margaret, a junior in high school, is ready to follow her mother's footsteps. However, she "is already worried about whether she will be able to compete for and receive scholarships." Monteleone said, "Many of the girls I coach suffer from anxiety over having to compete against male-bodied athletes. We all know the powerful scientific neurotransmitter connection between our minds and our bodies: When you think you can win, you have a better chance of doing it. It’s proven."
Monteleone described her anxiety in 2018 when she competed against a trans athlete. "At the 2018 World Masters Athletics Championships in Malaga, Spain, I competed in the 200-meter race against a male-bodied athlete, whom I beat by only a few tenths of a second," said Monteleone. "The next year, the same athlete beat my teammate in the hurdles for a place on the podium at the 2019 World Championship indoor meet in Poland. My teammate had trained harder than anyone I know."
Monteleone claimed that "numerous studies have shown males continue to hold large physical advantages over females, even when suppressing their testosterone." "A male’s muscular advantage is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed, and males are still 12% faster than their female counterparts after two years of feminizing hormones," Monteleone said.
Recently, Penn swimmer Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle race at the Ivy League championships on Thursday night, February 17, swimming neck to neck with her competitors for the first part of the race. Thomas took a lead around the halfway mark and finished in 4 minutes, 37.32 seconds. Penn sophomore Catherine Buroker was in second place and posted a time of 4:44.83, which is a seasonal best. Social media, however, has hailed Buroker as the 'true' winner.