le=”padding-left: 40px”>To listen to Oliver’s justification of this absurdity was to wonder if he had paid any attention these past five years. His deployment of the “Phelps gambit” – the idea of a man’s sporting advantage over a woman being roughly akin to the one Michael Phelps, the 23-time Olympic champion swimmer, enjoyed over his rivals – was especially risible. As Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist, has highlighted, Phelps’s edge over his nearest pursuer in the 2004 Olympic butterfly final was 0.08 per cent. But what about the gap between his time and that of Petria Thomas, winner of the equivalent women’s event that summer? A mammoth 12.62 per cent.
And here's a thread from the organisation that Oliver specifically targeted…
She Won recently made an appearance on Last Week Tonight. John Oliver stuck to his tired recipe: dishonest sanctimony wrapped in a thick coating of self-deprecation (all the easier to swallow), this time about male athletes in women’s sports and specifically about our org. 🧵1/n:
— shewon.org (@shewon_org) April 7, 2025
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