Ladies’s sports advocate Riley Gaines endorses Ron DeSantis for president

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis picked up the endorsement of one of many prime advocates for girls’s sports on Thursday and can marketing campaign along with her on Friday.

All-American swimmer Riley Gaines endorsed Mr. DeSantis for president in an look on Eric Bolling’s Newsmax present “The Balance.”

“I’m so excited to announce that I am officially endorsing Gov. DeSantis as president,” Ms. Gaines stated.

Ms. Gaines, a 5-time SEC champion on the University of Kentucky, praised Mr. DeSantis’ acts on girls’s sports and different points as “crucial in rooting out the radical ideology that’s really driving this insanity, and really bringing visibility to these cultural issues that affect the breakdown of families, the breakdown of faith, the breakdown of freedom.”

In a press launch Thursday night, the DeSantis marketing campaign famous that he had signed in June 2021 one of many first state legal guidelines to specify that feminine sports had been reserved for organic females at start.

It additionally famous that in March 2022, he had “issued a proclamation declaring Florida-born Emma Weyant as the winner of the women’s 500-yard (457-meter) freestyle at the NCAA women’s tournament, rather than transgender athlete Lia Thomas.”

Ms. Gaines stated in her Newsmax look that she is going to seem with Mr. DeSantis in Greenville, South Carolina, on Friday night to focus on the problem of girls’s sports and the participation of organic males in them.

“He’s really taken on this political establishment, the woke corporations, the media, and he’s won and we know this based off his success in Florida alone,” she stated of the Florida governor.

The DeSantis endorsement is “based off my own experience in being forced to compete and change in the locker room with a male,” stated Ms. Gaines, who was defeated on the 2022 NCAA girls’s swimming championships by Ms. Thomas.