First female athlete to lose NCAA title to biological male wants honors returned to women

In the annals of NCAA history, Minna Svard holds a unique distinction: She was the first female athlete to lose a women’s title to a known transgender competitor.

The year was 2019, and Svard was a favorite to win the 400-meter hurdles at the NCAA Division II outdoor track and field championships. Instead, she placed second to CeCe Telfer, who burst onto the women’s scene that season after competing for two years in men’s collegiate track.

Now Svard wants the NCAA to correct the record. After years of silence, the 26-year-old Swede has gone public, urging the NCAA to delete biological males from its official results in past women’s competitions and move up female athletes accordingly.

Svard, who was a sophomore at East Texas A&M University when she ran against Telfer, described the experience of losing to a male-born athlete as “shocking.”

“I never expected to move to America, to leave my family and my culture, everything that I knew, to come to a country to get an opportunity to compete in track on a level like this, and then to have to stand on the start line and compete with a biological male,” she told The Washington Times.

She placed the blame squarely on the NCAA. At the time, the association let male-born athletes compete in women’s sports following a year of testosterone reduction, which Telfer did.

“That was very shocking and unexpected for me,” Svard said. “I never thought that an organization like the NCAA would actually allow that to happen, the unfairness that it brings to the sport.”

Before the Division II championships, she had not competed against Telfer, a student at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire. Svard said she learned of the athlete’s transgender identity only a few weeks earlier through the grapevine.

The NCAA told her nothing about Telfer’s status at the championships, but did make an announcement about the importance of inclusivity to the crowd at Texas A&M University-Kingsville’s Javelina Stadium.

Some spectators booed Telfer, according to a 2019 report in Outsports, but the athlete won the race easily, finishing ahead of Svard by nearly two seconds.

Svard said she was “really upset.” Still, she forced herself to put on a happy face.

“I started crying, but my first reaction was to wipe my tears to make sure no one saw I was crying,” she said. “I didn’t know how it would be received by the public because the NCAA called it out on the speakers that we needed to show good sportsmanship and we needed to be inclusive. So that felt very directed toward the people competing against CeCe.”

Minna Svärd was the 1st woman to lose her NCAA title to a male. When Cecé Telfer competed as a man he placed 390th, but in 2019 he won Gold in the women’s division. Minna wants her medal back @icons_women pic.twitter.com/PwffTt2xth

— BoxingMeetsBeauty (@BoxingMBeauty) March 18, 2025

At the time, the issue of transgender athletes in female sports was barely a blip on the screen.

It wasn’t until March 2020 that Idaho became the first state to pass a Fairness in Women’s Sports Act. And transgender competitor Lia Thomas didn’t begin smashing women’s collegiate swimming records until the 2021-22 season.

Svard said that in 2019, she knew no one that she could turn to for support. She also feared she could be sanctioned by the NCAA if she complained publicly.

“I didn’t know. Was I safe? Would I be OK? Will the NCAA suspend me? Would they kick me out?” she said. “I didn’t know what could happen, and since I was so far away from home, I felt very small.”

Why come forward now? She said she was emboldened by people and groups, including former champion swimmer Riley Gaines and the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, challenging policies that let biological males compete in female sports based on gender identity.

“When I started hearing about Riley Gaines and the other female athletes who are actually suing the NCAA, I wanted to show my support and help them as much as I could,” Svard said. “So I contacted Riley’s attorney, and through him I got in contact with ICONS. They’re amazing.”

She did speak out once previously about her situation. In 2020, she said on Instagram that she was the actual winner of the women’s 400-meter title because she was the “fastest (biological born) female in the race.”

Svard said Telfer took a screenshot of the post and reposted it on Instagram Story.

“After she did that, 550 hate comments dropped down on my post,” Svard said. “I got DMs, direct messages, with people calling me transphobic, a homophobe, a racist. They called me all of these things and threatened me in direct messages.”

Meanwhile, Telfer has been hailed as an LGBTQ icon.

ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” featured Telfer in a 2019 segment. The athlete starred in a 2021 Michelob Ultra ad campaign that sought to “increase the visibility of female athletes” and promote “gender equality in sports.”

The New York Times ran a sympathetic 2021 profile about Telfer’s thwarted bid to make the U.S. Olympic women’s track team headlined, “’For My People’: A Transgender Woman Pursues an Olympic Dream.”

In men’s track as Craig Telfer, he was considerably less successful, ranking 200th in 2016 and 390th in 2017 in the Division II 400-meter hurdles. Even so, Telfer has denied having an unfair physical advantage over women, citing the effects of hormone suppression.

Telfer blasted President Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order last month in a CNN interview, insisting that “trans athletes are not a threat to sports.”

The NCAA revamped its gender-eligibility policy last month by requiring athletes to compete based on the sex on their birth records. And the Education Department has pressed the association to go further by giving female athletes the titles won by biological males.

Telfer has spoken out against the push to redo the NCAA results, arguing that “that’s not how history works.”

“That’s not how the direction of progressiveness works. And you can’t take back history,” said Telfer in the Feb. 18 interview.

Svard recently returned to Sweden to be closer to her family and she plans to continue her advocacy on behalf of single-sex women’s sports. She’s working with ICONS, which has three lawsuits against biological males in female collegiate sports.

The NCAA has not commented publicly on Svard’s calls to realign its official women’s sports records, but has defended its role in promoting female athletes.

“College sports are the premier stage for women’s sports in America, and while the NCAA does not comment on pending litigation, the Association and its members will continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships,” said the association in a statement last month.