After Shelby Houlihan washes up in the results of a half-marathon, pro-cheating Alison Wade plays bully-by-proxy

Sadly, it's no mystery why sponsors support her newsletter. Perhaps she at least appreciates the irony of the multiple undeserved handouts she's received from male-run companies

In June of last year, Shelby Houlihan and her shitbag coaches at the Bowerman Track Club, Jerry Shumacher and Shalane Flanagan, announced to the world in so many words that, nope, the outdoor 1,500-meter and 5,000-meter American record holder hadn’t been injured all spring after all; she’d been serving a four-year doping suspension that had begun in January, and she’d been lying for months to anyone who asked about her about her curiously blank 2021 racing schedule, hoping that her ban would be overruled in time for the Olympic Trials and never become public news at all.

The solemn-faced coterie of BTC shitbags used this tacit admission to warm up their small, hyper-pliable Zoom audience for a battery of increasingly incriminating and far-fetched falsehoods. This audience included Alison Wade, Erin Strout, and Chris Chavez, all of whom are some combination of squint-eyed, deluded, agenda-driven, and perpetually disinclined to write anything negative about their heroes the sport’s athletes. These three sat there, open-mouthed and self-important, as Houlihan went on to tell a story that only a moron would actually believe, but that lots of shady people and media outlets pretended to entertain because that storyline was more comfortable, and hance more popular, than reality.

Today’s journalists, even those who earned a degree in a relevant field, didn’t go into the profession to get derailed by serious, challenging, consequential stories like the Houlihan fiasco, a next-level cataclysm that required them to report uncomfortable truths about a runner they had all habitually flattered or at worst ignored, and who they knew enjoyed great in-universe popularity.

In a past era, the whole episode would have invited deeper scrutiny of the entire BTC—especially given the media’s eagerness to go after a Nike club that is in almost every practical way the BTC’s direct ancestor. Someone might have even perpetrated at least one instance of bona fide journalism. But in an era of social-media-led “journalism” that brings the suck-ups, axe-grinders, and click-hounds now drawn to the field into close contact with their subjects. That era is gone forever, as anyone granted access to a professional running club’s athletes now carries the understanding that it’s not just okay but obligatory to do what they’re inclined to do anyway: Serve as PR agents and deflectors of true and consequential, but potentially damaging, stories rather than people eager to track those very stories down. This is all made more nauseating by how fucking flavorless they all manage to be, but that’s another story.

The result, as we* know, was an astonishing number of running fans, website operators, and journalists failing what amounted to a combination IQ test and personal ethics check.

On July 16, Houlihan participated in a half-marathon near her hometown in Iowa. I’m assuming it wasn’t USATF-sanctioned, even if it was obviously timed and scored. If that’s the case, I don’t think there is anything more stopping her from entering such events than there is her doing, and reporting on, solo time trials.

A Twitter user named Jamie Langley wanted the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (which is led by Travis Tygart, who doesn’t actually give a fuck about doping by Americans) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (whose leadership at this moment is passing around a huge blunt in a luxurious conference room and debating whether to remove Chronic from the banned-substances list wholesale) to be aware of Houlihan’s result. Whether Houlihan participating was at odds with her ban or not, this is certainly a fair move, especially given Houlihan’s stoic refusal to stop lying and grifting and instead start barking about being singled out (which is coming…yes, that’s coming, it’s just a matter of when).

Alison Wade (the deadname of Fast Women), who sends out a weekly newsletter every Monday to over 500 paying Patreon supporters and has over 26,000 Twitter followers, decided to use her ostensibly harridans-only Facebook group to incite harassment of Langley for his inhumane and uncalled-for tweet, which he had no right to make.

That’s right; not only did Wade not confront Langley directly for…well, doing nothing other than highlighting a possible rules infraction by someone with a proven propensity to infract; she also purposefully stoked anger hoping her Facebook followers would mosey over to Twitter and shit on Langley. I mean, what else could have been going through her mind—”Let’s invite this guy to the group”?

So, Wade’s response to someone “trying to get Shelby Houlihan in trouble” (and if Wade hasn’t noticed, Shelbo is not at risk for seeing a spotless behavioral record blemished) is “Go cause this fucker some trouble.”

Wade has done very much this sort of thing before. She’s a cowardly bag of resentments who relies on Trump-like tactics to rally her white-woman-pain-riddled base. But more concerning than this is her undisguisedly pro-doping stance, which in the past she has at least mitigated with lip-service yawping about how drugs are bad, m’kay?

I mean, I get having resentments and attaching whatever motor to those you can to them, all the while trying to shoehorn it all into some kind of “greater good” stance. That can get you through a lot of rainy, indoor, unempowered-feeling days. But what I can’t accept is the complete flipping of the script from “dopers should be punished, even if it sucks” to “the punishment for doping sucks too much, so doping suspensions must be overturned in the court of public opinion.”

Coming from an alleged advocate of fairness in women’s and girls’ running, this is, to use a word Wade would appreciate, gross. I can’t tell you how many standout collegians, Division I All-Americans, opt out of running professionally out of fear of either stalling at, say, a clean 13:10 5,000 meters or committing to the highest level of athletic excellence and starting to use banned substances. They hear stories of how irritating it is to start feeling like you’re in the minority along honorable competitors, and you see people you idolized back in in high school and who you assumed were competing clean as pros maybe doing things you thought only Russians did. Maybe that’s the forever reality of world-class endurance sports, but cheering it on is supposed to be the purview of nitwits and jaded, beer-bellied drunks who only watch track during the Olympics, not self-described advocates of pro running.

Then there’s Wade’s oft-professed concern for the well-being of teenage girls owing to the pressures they face. If Wade actually cared about this at a deeper level, she wouldn’t be trying to hide the truth about the sport from anyone, and certainly wouldn’t be trying to protect dopers from the consequences of not only the behavior that got them banned, but ongoing possible hijinks.

The numbers-chocked portion of Wade’s newsletter is basically a nastiness-laundering operation. She dutifully collects race results from around the world and offers desultory comments here and there. She links to as many podcasts by women, especially women of color, as she can. On the surface, she doesn’t do anything more diabolical than keeping people from going to Letsrun.com and getting the same race results, faster than Wade supplies them and with deeper analyses by Jon Gault than Wade is interested in writing.

Apart from any gratuitous, Jordan Peterson-esque things I've said about Wade and hew crew, here are the realities:

• She went after the career of Gary Cantrell, whose actions make him among the most progressive figures in running, based on an easily demonstrated lie.

• She's all-in on the “transfemales are females” and “let DSD folks run as women” anti-woman and anti-girl arguments, and she hasn't said a word I know of in response to the growing number of high-profile female athletes who have come out in favor of women. She knows that pro women runners are not down with this.

• She serially "elevates" anti-white racists (Alison Desir) and women who have said really nasty things about every ethnic group other than black (Gwen Berry).

• She doesn't give two shits about doping, yet pretends to care about the ultimate well-being of women athletes.

She’s free to do and say what she wants, and to reveal herself as motivated by churlishness toward men of all sexes and women of all sexes alike. But what seems fucked up is that Wade has gotten a whole slate of companies to sponsor her newsletter. Even if she weren’t making a few thousand dollars a month from her Patreon base, why are so many of these companies okay with a product supplied by someone so proudly destructive to the sport?

Remember: We* have high standards now. If a white person does something intentionally oppressive on social media, especially in defense of a white person who’s done something wrong, we* need to deprive that entity of external support, and preferably keep them from having a communication platform at all.

I know the answer as do you. If you didn’t know of Wade’s unpleasantries, her newsletter would be considered okay, and it’s a great recap of events for people who don’t have the time or inclination to patrol the Web for race results. But even if it were mediocre at best, it’s also the only newsletter I know of in its niche. If companies like Tracksmith, New Balance, and others didn’t lend support while continuing to partially subsidize similar products produced by men, they’d be tagged as sexist and the complaining would never stop.

So, I hope pro-doping, pro-bullying, chickenshit Wade (not a dummy, just a dumpster-fire) at least recognizes how good she has it: She can shit all over men practically nonstop, and the cash will flow in from the patriarchy right alongside the donations from the “OFF WITH THEIR COCKS!”-style feminists.

P.S. I know what some of you are thinking: “You’re jealous Wade does so well.” On the contrary, I’m glad that opportunities still exist for people to make a living writing and writing solely about running, as this is all shifting toward an individual-content-provider model. Wade does this flawfully by my reckoning, but a lot of people believe differently. So, on that level, good for her. Besides, not only would I refuse to take anything from inside the runningverse (dark money remains fine), but what company or organization would sponsor this shit anyway? The International Ceaseless Discontent Forum?