Clean Sport Collective soils itself in a rambling chat with a journalist impersonator

The running media is a private club for bratty children, and this podcast is another furtive tug-job in the jacuzzi

Clean Sport Collective is a non-profit organization describing itself as “a community of powerful voices comprised of athletes, brands, events, clubs, fans and the public” that is “united for honesty, transparency and integrity.” Its alleged mission is “to support the pursuit of clean sport and athletics through the absence of performance enhancing drugs” though a podcast intended to “celebrate clean athletes, educate [listeners] on issues in the world of clean sport, and bring hope that we can all believe in the power of fair play across all sports.” It evidently first coalesced around the Kara Goucher-Nike Oregon Project controversy, although Goucher is “not on the Board or anything.”

If the hosts, Chris McClung and Shanna Burnette, ever expected serious listeners to take any of that high-flown jabber seriously, they shed that expectation before or when they hosted Erin Strout on the podcast’s 96th episode. This forty-five minutes of ridiculous self-stroking bullshit—which, if nothing else, you can listen to at 10 times the normal speed with no loss of information—is yet another issue-skirting, incompetence-rewarding collaboration between content creators intended solely to justify the existence of both eminently disposable parties.

I’ll summarize the podcast below, but I’d be remiss to not preload those notes with the only accurate description of Erin Strout and her work you’ll find, other than in other posts on this blog.

Strout is a malignant polymoron with no business working in any field demanding eloquence, analytical skill, integrity, or guts. Being irreparably deficient in each of these areas, however, hasn’t stopped Strout from pursuing a career that requires an A-game in all four—journalism—and gamely whining, bitching, and snail-trailing her way toward the top of the slagheap the running media has deservedly become.

Even within a cohort of pundits and Wokish hatchet-women so dazzlingly inept that their nonstop bullshitting more closely resembles unclever satire than an effort to convincingly mislead—in a pitiful whimper of a sport increasingly ripe for comprehensive abolition, a concern I’ll address shortly—Strout stands out as recklessly incompetent. Her astonishing level of self-delusion is enabled and perpetuated by a proudly defiant insularity—”I don’t have to respond to them!”—and an absolute refusal to engage with any of the items in her enormous database of dismal screw-ups.

Strout is as well-suited for a job in journalism as I am to compete in sumo wrestling—except that, given the chance, I would learn the rules of that sport and abide by them and at least aim for an optimal result in the course getting knocked decisively out of the building.

I harbor a deep appreciation of sloppily written praise of allegedly great writing. How is that not as funny as two dudes arguing over which offers more comfort, Tampax tampons or Costco’s in-house brand?

Moreover, such a phenomenon inevitably signals a conversation saturated with both legitimate confusion and dick-twisting insincerity. Here are selected notes on that conversation:

• Introduction: McClung congratulates himself and other participants in the previous day’s Chicago Marathon, and gives a shout-out Goucher on an excellent commentating job. Burnette tells McClung she’s excited about his impending Boston Marathon, giving him a chance to announce he won’t be running with carbon-fiber shoes, because, while he doesn’t judge supershoe-wearers, he wants his own race to be “all him.”

• ~6:00: Strout reveals having been mentored by current Runner’s World editor-in-chief Sarah Lorge Butler in the late 1990s, unironically giggling that this “created a monster.” (Almost every exposition by Strout in this exchange is followed by a theatrical “Wow!” type of response from one of the hosts.)

• ~9:00: Strout describes moving to Flagstaff and Lorge Butler’s continued role in her own writing. McClung observes that Strout has by this time achieved “career nirvana,” contradicting Burnette’s earlier comment about Strout’s “burgeoning” writing career.

• ~11:00: Strout describes formally becoming a fangirl without any awareness of doing so. (One if the advantages of listening to a dimwitted, eager-to-play-along podcast guest is the inability of such people to not reveal who they really are.)

• ~13:00: McClung asks Strout what the highs and lows of the job are. Strout says one of the lows is becoming bored with the topic of running, not that you’d notice from her soporific prose. She says one of the highs is being able to use a running-writing job as a platform for other important things. Burnette comments that Strout has a flair for describing what she sees with unusual accuracy, leading me to dismiss Burnette as either illiterate, a liar, or someone who has simply not read much of what Strout has written.

• ~16:00: Despite repeated emphasis by both hosts that Strout is a journalist, McClung moves on to the importance of storytelling. That word has, in an uncountable number of recent cases, become code in the Twitter-activist and “influencer” world for “Invent whatever butthurt-based narrative you want to make certain people like you more while dismissing your critics as haters,” which is the diametric opposite of journalism.

• ~17:45: Burnette asks Strout if she ever gets pushback, revealing that she must spend much of her time on Mars. Strout says she’s shielded “on the advertising side”—the woman does love herself some shields—but says there are agents who won’t connect her to certain athletes, perhaps because the athletes themselves don’t want to talk to her, blaming this on “issues she’s covered.” This is heartening news and hopefully a rising trend.

• ~19:00: Strout says that losing access to certain athletes won’t slow her down, because “if a story is out there and it’s fair and accurate, then I’m not going to not tell that story, it’s not going to stop me.” She seems to think that accurate stories exist as prepackaged things, like fruit on trees, and it’s up to her to recognize and pluck the good ones, rather than craft them herself.

• ~20:00: Strout admits she would fail a test on men’s competitive running, though it wasn’t always that way. (This one earns the trite label “a good start.”) She then expresses honest surprise that men even read Women’s Running. a fact she apparently learned about in the course of getting “pushback.”
  
  This is the same woman who wrote this:

  

  
  Now why on Earth would she think that men as a rule aren’t enchanted by her perspectives?

• ~21:15: Strout and Burnette agree that running coverage by the trade running publications is “pretty balanced.” Burnette favorably contrasts Women’s Running with SELF, a reservoir of what she calls “watered-down women’s content” (I laughed).

• ~21:45: This is where the bullshit becomes almost surreal. Burnette states that Strout is one of the few voices in the sport willing to talk openly about doping, despite very recent history making this compliment an outright farce. And it’s not Strout’s personal position that Shelby Houlihan was shafted that matters (and if she believes she has concealed that view, she’s wrong); it’s that Strout was unable to keep this from her reporting on the matter from start to finish and did not even explore the possibility Houlihan had doped so she could knock that down. This was part of a unified running-media front.

  As I endured this mess, it was evident that the podcast producers have no intention of living up to their mission. Strout actually believes that informing the public of a doping positive represents bold but necessary step in preserving the integrity of the sport. She doesn’t grasp that a journalist wouldn’t even consider minimizing such news for the alleged good of the sport’s reputation, or regard anything about reporting it as courageous. Honestly, this makes me want running to disappear just so the oily people who have seeped into covering it can’t mess everything up so…monstrously.

• ~23:00: McClung brings up the Houlihan suspension, and refers to a 2019 profile of Houlihan by Strout in Women’s Running. McClung observes that Strout got pushback for her coverage of the suspension, thereby again negating earlier chunks of this idiotic banter. Strout discloses that she has known members of Houlihan’s family for some time. She has been molding herself into an unconditional cheerleader from that start, and hot just with Shelbo.

  Strout says it’s her place to report what she knows and believes people unfairly dissected some of her individual sentences. This is not remotely the problem with Erin Strout and her reporting. Remember, this is someone who made her Twitter account private because she can’t take any negative input whatsoever. Maybe she’s not a horrible person, but she is absolutely in the wrong job, insulated from this reality only by having loads of company, and not just in the running media.

  Although it doesn’t come up in this moment, Strout cannot possibly lay claim to a willingness to present both sides of a divisive story accurately. All of her reporting on transgender and intersex athletes establishes this beyond all doubt, as Strout has consistently ignored the interests of biological girls and women and painted all opposition to her own stance as coming from toxic Republicans and bigots. She is nothing but a shitty essayist masquerading as a journalist.

• ~25:00: “How do you deal with pushback?” Burnette asks. “People have a lot of opinions, people are opinionated!” Strout admits she’d be a robot if she “didn’t get a little upset about it, here and there,” and says she’s used to pushback since getting it back in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by postal mail. She says her social media accounts make her wonder what’s wrong with other people—giggle, giggle! (These folks think Strout is just the greatest thing since the double-ended vibrator.)

  Strout says that people have the right to be critical (thanks!), then goes through every bullshitting snowflake’s spiel about being willing to respond to respectful criticism. Anyone who has seen Strout’s own tweets and stories knows that her concept of “respect” is as warped and narrow as any other chickenshit’s, that she’s one more blowhard who can’t take the disrespect her work invites, and that she simply classifies anything she is afraid to confront as disrespectful and hence not worth engaging with.

  See, a real journalist has to deal with even the haters if their criticism is on the money. Otherwise, it’s just a chickenshit dodge. In fact, a real journalist invites, even begs for blowback, because a real journalist believes that she has “steel-manned” her thesis and can ably defend it against any criticism. Cowardice has no role, but it’s more urgent than that; even being hesitant, feeling too much of the humanity in the dopers and other miscreants you’re writing about, is crippling to any journalistic endeavor, and those are perfectly valid feelings people experience in conflicts every day of their lives. People unable to manage this line properly need to step the fuck off and let someone else do the job, if anyone even wants it, and that includes virtually every member of today’s running media.

• ~27:00: Strout says she can’t honestly recall getting any constructive criticism, and McClung admits he was cajoling her into expressing the idea that constructive criticism simply doesn’t exist, at least on Twitter. It’s funny how all of these meatheads label Twitter a cesspool, yet also behave as if that’s the only place journalists are criticized for their efforts. Believe me, Strout knows otherwise and goes to great lengths to see her critics stamped out, and thanks to the metastatic pussification of everyone involved in this cancer of an industry, she’s gotten her way at least some of the time.

• ~29:15: Burnette observes that Strout is a running insider, after which there was not a dry vagina in the room. Burnette asks Strout how anyone can possibly remain optimistic about running, knowing what she knows. She then starts babbling about her readership consisting of joggers, so hakuna matata. And she’s achieving personal goals she never thought she could. Stuff completely divorced from anything related to journalism.

• ~31:30: All parties fret that people will not feel connected to running because of all the doping. Mention of Des Linden, who is willing to hang with “common folks like me” (that’s from Strout, who was just labeled an insider). McClung jumps in here to offer Des an unofficial MVP award for her sarcasm on Twitter, a site McClung earlier called a cesspool. I like Des Linden and love sarcasm, but I doubt the latter quality helps clear any of the turds from that cesspool.

I was told by multiple others that I could stop at this point if all I wanted was the relevant dumbness and not all of it. I listened past a half hour for a few minutes, and, coupled to what Strout said earlier about how she deals with eyebrow-raising performances, it’s clear that for all her years watching and writing, Strout lacks a fundamental understanding of distance running at various crucial levels. Maybe she struggles with math, which tends to get in the way. Maybe she’s so driven by feelings that some of the raw data eludes her even when she’s looking for it. Who knows?

Strout is what she is. But looking at the other side of this wobbly table, I’m not sure what a podcast like this one is supposed to add, either, about doping in running or anything. As a broad enterprise, it seems like something conceived in good faith, but it is clearly now just part of the burgeoning money-and-attention grab couples to mutual backslapping that has kept a great many superfluous content creators and their content afloat while Wokism remains a powerful draw. This feeding from the trough reminds me of the flood “inside the White House” books from operatives in the Trump and Obama administrations, but I like to think the people I’m being snowflakey about aren’t that bad, though only for lack of the brainpower to rise to real prominence.

It’s one thing to promote the querulous efforts of an inept writer as competent journalism, but if this podcast is about clean sport, and is U.S.-based, and is Kara Goucher’s de facto bullhorn, then why have its progenitors not been hiking up the Bowerman Track Club’s skirt since, say, mid-June to check for other forms of pharmaceutical rot under there?

If you’re a properly suspicious individual, it might go like this: Kara Goucher accused Alberto Salazar of running a dirty Nike-funded-and-controlled program, referencing testosterone cream as a linchpin of this claim. If her allegations are true, does Goucher honestly believe that the Nike-funded-and-controlled BTC is doing anything different at root level, with the notable replacement of Salazar’s persona by Jerry Schumacher’s? Did Phil Knight just give up on the idea of winning Olympic medals, yet decide to keep alive an elite track club designed expressly to develop, and compete with, the best runners on the planet? This seems somewhat naive—and that’s without accounting for the newer variable of a doping positive that eliminated the team’s best runner.

I was firmly in Goucher’s corner when the NOP scandal broke, and in many ways still am. (She is a true patchwork of a person, or persona, not easy to characterize simply.) But this was largely contingent on the belief that she just might pull a Floyd Landis or Jose Canseco and admit that her own use of pharmaceuticals reached beyond the use of thyroid hormone (for which she has long had a valid prescription, or at least did as an NOP member) and into the territory she ventured others like Galen Rupp into by implication. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out this is what happened, even if I still lean the other way. But if Goucher is indeed harboring a dirty secret, she’s apparently never going to tell it.

In any case, the Clean Sport Collective seems to have a narrower mission than its title implies; maybe “Preaching Anti-Doping Because It’s Cool Like a BLM Sign, But Not Really Checking” would be a better title, though perhaps too cumbersome for the medium. It seems like an effort at good old-fashioned PR for at least one of its principal, if unofficial, figures.

Lastly comes a helpful note on what journalism is and is not. Even were Strout’s reporting earnest and accurate, she still wouldn’t qualify as a journalist, because writing about events already in the news isn’t journalism. The difference between what the waterheads in the corporate running media do and what real journalists do is the difference between writing about something everyone already knows something about (“The Boston Marathon was yesterday—here’s what happened”) and independently pursuing suspicions to unearth findings that become news (“The Boston Marathon no longer offers open prize money fifteen deep. We looked into this and found…”)

Jon Krakauer used to do long-form journalism. Then he became so thorough about it that he had to stick to writing entire books. He would seek out stories, real ones, and explore them with the unflinching determination of the raging intellect coupled in intractable OCD. He wasn’t waiting for the future to hand him topics to explore. In the running world, this isn’t as easy, but it’s been done. Running With the Buffaloes isn’t everyone’s favorite—I really enjoyed it—but it’s clearly journalism. At the start of 1998, everyone knew that the Division I NCAA Men’s Cross-Country Championship would be held on November 23 in Kansas. But who besides Chris Lear decided in 1998 to write about an entire top college cross-country program from the inside?

But such distinctions aren’t vital or even necessary when considering how bad this cast of cretins is when it comes to handling information. Women’s Running, in completely ignoring the interests of most high-school girl runners in favor of pushing a zero-sum-game social agenda, might be the worst excuse for a women’s running publication ever conceived. No one there is even trying.

Listening to running podcasts between collaborating bullshitters is like listening to a "How We Quit Drinking" podcast where the hosts and guests sincerely discuss the value of a few daily "recovery beers" to unwind and combat the stress of living a sober life.

The sport of distance running itself doesn’t suck, but you’d never know it from its packaging and the priorities of dangerous intellectuals like Strout and her hosts. The media’s collective insistence on ramming every athletic issue through a perverted social-justice processor has conveniently obliterated the ethical guidelines its members once followed, and the results really are both “I can say what I want” and “I can cancel or ignore dissenters.” This bunch has become so used to synthesizing private realities that even concerning stories without a conspicuous Wokish angle, like the Houlihan ban, they organize around whatever narrative is required for maximal in-group popularity, a sad and furtive approach uniformly inconsistent with factual reporting.

Hopefully, organized running will disappear within days to weeks as people assimilate these kind and hopeful dispatches and start to wise up. I may, in fact, rename this blog the Profanity-Free No-Running Initiative without otherwise changing a fucking thing about it. In the meantime, bring on the American League Championship series, beginning tonight when the Boston Red Sox visit the Houston Astros. And bring back steroids, so we* can see some meaningful home-run and RBI totals again.