Alison Wade gives another "let the poor girl DOPE!" seminar, this time on behalf of protégé-of-scumbags Addy Wiley

The milking of assigned female victimhood for every drop of sour discharge this leathery teat can provide has no place in sports punditry

Alison Wade is, like me, a northern New England-born-and-educated jogging enthusiast who maintains a Substack newsletter partly about the sport of distance running. Wade’s virtual bleat-box and Beck of the Pack, however, promulgate somewhat divergent sociocultural and athletic ideals.

Called Fast-Women and framed as a newsletter that showcases and uplifts competitive female distance runners—and the site does feature write-ups of the results of all known races with women or transwomen in them, along with a bevy of links to distaff-specific podcasts and Instagram profiles—Wade’s operation at its core serves as a clarion for fomenting and legitimizing pseudo-feminist butthurt. Its target audience is white, affluent harridans unperturbed by a grim and worsening economy and perpetually seeking to attribute bugbears such as body shame and a general lack of personal fulfillment to the white male patriarchy.

Wade gravitates with gyroscopic precision toward assigning the blame for any negative consequences that women athletes experience, including unwanted emotions, to the nearest available non-trans man in authority. Like many quasi-feminists of her vintage who perceive themselves to be sliding irreversibly downward from whatever already unfulfilling peak their lives reached perhaps a decade ago, Wade seems to detest successful men and women equally, expressing her contempt for the former more overtly with a “replace every male in the sport with a woman” theme and the latter by supporting the presence of female-identifying males in female-only sports and other “spaces.”

Some readers are familiar with the gruesome saga of Huntington University in northeastern Indiana and its former track coaches, the very dynamic husband-and-wife duo Nick and Lauren Johnson. Allegations against the two of nearly every kind of standard abuse conceivable first came to light last October, and Nick Johnson has since been charged with felony sexual battery and battery.

Both coaches have been accused by their athletes of giving them pills and “injections” that were probably not mRNA vaccines, given that Lauren Johnson told police that Nick had prescriptions for both the blood-booster erythropoietin (EPO) and the anabolic steroid testosterone.

The 58-page police report containing these and other details reads at points like a Stephen King short story with all traces of ironic ribaldry and gallows-humor excised to leave behind a steamrolling narrative of systematic exploitation and degradation. The Johnsons are unusually sociopathic people even for ambitious collegiate coaches.

Addsion (“Addy”) Wiley is a 19-year-old sophomore at Huntington who on September 4 ran a time of 1:57.64 for 800 meters in Bellinzona, Switzerland. That elevated Wiley to #2 all-time on the U.S. women’s collegiate list—far behind #1 Athing Mu’s once-Athing Mu-like 1:55.04 from 2021—and #11 all-time on the U.S. women’s comprehensive outdoor list.

Four days later, Wiley ripped a 3:59.17 1,500 meters at the Memorial van Damme meet in Belgium to break Jennifer (“Jenny”) Simpson’s 2009 collegiate mark of 3:59.90. I don’t really think collegiate track marks should be up for grabs at September meets in Europe against multi-time Olympians, but this is probably the least of the concerning aspects of any of Wiley’s marks.

Wiley is an active member of the Instagram community, where she has amassed over 5,000 followers and, based on the attributes of her profile, is evidently available for direct messaging. All of this is presumably by her own choice.

Wade used to regularly remind us* to not to talk about teenage female phenoms unless we knew them personally, and whose raison d'etre is purportedly diminishing the influence of male coaches known to abuse, or suspected of abusing, women athletes. All of this somehow forgotten, Wade’s take on Monday on what she called Wiley’s “breakthrough year” and the howls of derision and skepticism that Wiley’s startling progression has understandably received is a wonder of either denial or “who cares if she’s doping?” And I don’t think Wade has difficulty processing the weight of the variables in the equation here.

Key quotes (oomphases mine):

Wiley’s association with former Huntington University (HU) coaches Nick and Lauren Johnson has cast doubt on her accomplishments. Wiley, who attended high school in the same town as HU, began working with the Johnsons when she was in ninth grade. It’s not Wiley’s fault that the local college coaches happened to be bad seeds. That was just poor luck. But her decision to continue to associate with them has been the subject of a lot of scrutiny.

Nick has also been accused of surreptitiously doping athletes, making them think they were participating in a legitimate scientific study.

Lauren admits Nick had prescriptions for EPO.

The number of times an athlete is drug tested is out of their control. But as of the end of August, Wiley had only been drug tested by USADA twice—once last year and once this year. But there are other testing agencies and she said on Twitter in August that she has had eight clean drug tests.

HU has a new set of coaches, who Wiley says are coaching her, but Wiley has remained close with Lauren. Beyond that, there are many accusations flying, but I don’t know if Wiley has remained in touch with Nick. I don’t know how involved Lauren is in Wiley’s running. I don’t know if Nick and Lauren are still together. Wiley’s choice not to put more distance between herself, the Johnsons, and HU has resulted in doping accusations and a lot of criticism, which would be hard for anyone to deal with, especially a 19-year-old.

On this view, Wiley’s station in life, including her ongoing relationships with career manipulators, is purely a product of externalities going back many years. Leave her alone. Huntington University has new coaches, and there’s nothing to see or even look at here. Well, except for the gal’s greatness.

This young woman first started working with Nick (“Nicholas”) Johnson when she was 14 years old. Huntington is not at NCAA school but an NAIA institution, and while I won’t go into the administrative differences here, it’s almost unheard of for an athlete as fast as Wiley was in high school (2:04.00 for 800 meters and 4:15.53 for 1,500 meters) to not go to an NCAA school unless they are complete academic zeroes. Wiley almost wound up a University of Colorado Buffalette, but elected to keep dancing in the wilds of Hoosier territory with the couple that had already shimmied her onto some exclusive stages.

It’s important to note that Huntington is a Christian school, because in my experience, the kind of girls who wind up at these places are conditioned as a rule to place an even more exaggerated level of unconditional trust in male authority figures than other young girls, as long as the dude also is, or says he is, Christian. This, in 2023, is no longer the state secret it was in Medieval times.

At the time Wiley was introduced to the Johnsons, she was too young to make sensible decisions; arguably, she still is. Can’t Wade appreciate the fact that Wiley is probably going to be operating for a long, long time under the dark and awful spell cast on her by both Johnsons and, apparently, by Nick Johnson in particular? Isn’t programming girls to be adults who make ill choices they would otherwise have never made part of the problem Wade ostensibly sees as critical to mitigate?

Wade knows what everyone else does about Addy Wiley’s situation: That this girl became the prodigy she did in a cult-like situation where blood-boosting drugs were unquestionably in play, and that she’s still close with one of the two perpetrators of the whole fugly ruckus—someone Wade herself labels “a bad seed.” (Just a “seed”? Looks the whole football-field-sized Johnson Family Orchard is full of rotten, wormy fruit.)

Yet she's proposing that speculation about poor, white Wiley is unfounded? Maybe what she means it’s that it’s just too mean to express, valid or not, because “circumstances.”

Wade and her fans staunchly refuse to acknowledge the obvious even given an ideally bleak set-up, one in which every variable—sex, drugs, but hopefully not Christian rock-and-roll—scales precisely with the worst of their stated concerns. They would rather enjoy the vicarious thrill of watching someone they view as a pure victim break records than stand behind their own supposed principles. And in the process, they diminish the sport itself for all women, at least those who don’t share their fluid-on-demand ethics.

And the whiter the victim, the better. Every time.

Maybe Wade really is deluded. Maybe the similar bias she has shown toward Shelby Houlihan and other Americans isn't just a contrivance; maybe Wade really thinks Wiley and other white Americans who look as dirty as can be, including those who have actually tested positive, are clean. Without video evidence followed by a full confession, who, after all, really has a right to judge any athlete?

But I doubt Wade really thinks Wiley has gotten to this point drug-free. Instead, Wade probably maintains a sliding-victimhood scale in her head that she applies, possibly without her own knowledge, to all situations in which white women are caught cheating or merely suspected of cheating. If a male coach is involved in helping a girl or a woman runner cheat, then sure, there’s a price to be paid somewhere—just not to the beleaguered female athlete who does the cheating.

If anything, she probably sees everyone on the Huntington team as a victim and thinks all of these women should get to dope with impunity for the rest of their lives. At least the ones fast enough to qualify for inclusion in the Fast-Women newsletter.

Mostly, Wade just wants everyone else to keep their suspicions to themselves. It’s unclear when she would open the gates for these suspicious and other brutal forms of sexist hectoring to flow unchecked across the Internet, if given this authority by God. Wiley will be 20 on October 24, but this is practically around the corner—surely too soon to stop infantilizing an adult, globetrotting world-class athlete who has the LORD on her side. (If Wiley herself wants to get on Wade’s bad side for some reason, she can start railing against the presence of transwomen in female races.)

For those who prefer to keep moral-ethical score, you can kind of have it both ways here. If Wiley is in fact cheating, she hasn’t known any differently since she first laced up training shoes. Maybe she’s been convinced that being the best she can be, however it happens, is part of a divine plan for her personal exaltation. Maybe she was actually doped without her own knowledge, as Wade seems to think happened with some of the women on the Huntington team.

But cheating is cheating no matter the ultimate and proximate factors that compel anyone to do it, and the idea that Wiley is running clean strikes me as somewhere between quixotic and nihilistic toward fair play. And the reminder that at least a few collegians have dabbled in saucy methods of performance-enhancement is more of a bummer than Wade’s predictable excuse-mongering in the face of everything she’s supposed to condemn.