The woman in the car park

Lynne Pinches reached the final of the Women’s Champion of Champions in 2023, shook her opponent’s hand, packed her cue away and walked off without taking a single shot. The room stood and cheered her out. Her opponent, a man called ‘Harriet’ Haynes, collected the trophy by default, as he and his supporters shouted ‘freebie’ in triumph.

She had earned that final. Thirty years in the game, hours of practice, and only the fourth final she had ever made. She told the Telegraph that walking away was “the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do in the game in my life”. The night before, she had been up into the small hours, crying, trying to decide whether what she was about to give up would change anything in a game that had just turned against her.

Haynes is not some marginal entrant who fluked his way into a draw. He finished 2024 as the top-ranked player in the women’s series, and he had topped it before that. The women were not inventing a hypothetical to be difficult. They had watched it happen to them, frame by frame, prize by prize, for years.

And then there’s the line the sport always reaches for, that pool is a game of skill rather than strength, so what could a man’s body possibly bring to it. It’s nonsense, and anyone who has held a cue knows it’s nonsense. The break rewards raw power, and men break harder. The bridge rewards reach and hand span, and men have bigger hands and longer arms, so a shot a smaller player has to reach for with a rest is a shot a man takes stretched flat across the cloth with full control. Lynne has said it plainly. She watches the men clear up, potting everything in a single visit to the table, and take on shots down the rails, tight against the cushion where there's no room for error, in a way the women in her category simply don't.

Haynes produced an MIT physicist to argue that a harder break doesn’t decide matches at the top level. His testimony might have been more convincing had it not been for the fact that, in April 2025, at an Ultimate Pool women’s event in Wigan, both finalists were men. Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith had each knocked out four female players to get there, and Haynes beat Smith 8-6 for a women’s title. Inside the hall, women held up signs reading “Save women’s sport” and chanted that they stood with Lynne Pinches.

I’m writing this piece because I just saw MJ Murphy’s enraged and enraging video on the affair. When I knew Lynne in Norwich, the thing that haunted me was her astonishment at what was happening. Like me, she had assumed there had to be someone, somewhere, who would say this was madness and put a stop to it. Two men played each other in a women’s final. What makes MJ’s video useful is that she reacts to Lynne’s story with the fresh anger you have before you learn—as Lynne and I did— that there are no adults in the room, that people are cowards and collaborators, and women’s rights lasted only as long as they did because men didn’t yet know they could simply claim them as their own.

Lynne and a group of other women had already decided not to take it quietly. They went after the governing bodies in law, on the grounds that women were being denied fair competition, and they won the principle. After the Supreme Court confirmed last year that “woman” in equality law means what everyone outside a gender studies seminar already knew it meant, the pressure told. Ultimate Pool changed its rules to protect women-only competition.

The women were right, the law agreed, the category was theirs again.

A happy ending, then. Except Ultimate Pool, and the ‘trans community had to have their revenge.

After Lynne spoke up, the abuse arrived. She was told to kill herself. She was called a bigot, a transphobe, a Nazi. Police advised her to wear a bodycam for her own safety after she was attacked at a Let Women Speak event in Norwich, where a bottle of water was thrown at her back. So she wore one. At the Wigan event in April, Haynes's partner complained about it, and security asked her to take it off.

She did. They threw her out anyway.

In June, Ultimate Pool sent her a letter. She had been ejected, they said, for filming without their permission. The ban would be made permanent if she did it again, or if she said anything derogatory about them, though they would generously reconsider if she accepted that she had been at fault. She wouldn’t, because she hadn’t. So the ban stands. She is banned from playing. She is also banned from spectating, which means she now stands outside the venue while her own son competes inside.

The men reach the finals and lift the trophies. The woman who said out loud that this was wrong, and was then proved right by the highest court in the land, has to wait in the car park while her boy plays the game her family has played for three decades.

In March she lodged a claim against Ultimate Pool at the London Central County Court, with her solicitor Peter Daly, for discrimination on the grounds of belief and for victimisation. You can contribute to her legal fund here. She’s asking for a category that means what it says, and for the right to watch her son without being escorted off the premises.

Ultimate Pool watched the cheating happen and then went after the woman who refused to play along with it. They set out to punish her for defending herself against the cheating, abusive men who had walked into her sport and helped themselves to it. An institution looked at a woman protecting her own game, and decided she was the one who had to go.

I’m backing Lynne because every time they make an example of one woman, they’re talking to every other woman who was thinking about speaking up. “Stay quiet, or this happens to you”. The only answer to that is to make sure it costs them, every single time, to leave the woman who told the truth standing out in the cold.

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