Diversity dimwit Emilia Benton applies a private version of mathematics to the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials women's field
She's obviously not listening to the very words she's prying from her heroines "of color," who unlike Benton are more interested in training and competing than in accelerating societal strife
Even those unfamiliar with glowering jogger Emilia Benton and her areas of “journalistic” focus, but familiar with everything of academic value they had learned by age 12, can assess how skilled and earnest an information-merchant this woman is by reading only the headline and opening paragraphs of Benton’s January 29 piece for Women’s Running, “The Women’s 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon Will Be the Most Diverse in History.”
Benton’s use of the garbled phrase “the power of the growing representation”—an apparent attempted compound noun—in the subhead is a dire warning to those who prefer their English-language articles presented in a widely shared version of English. And the fact that she equates “several” with the number eight signals a similar alarm to readers familiar with the usual method of organizing and combining numbers—an especially helpful skill in a heavily quantitative sport such as distance running.
We’ll* start with the stuff that has nothing to do with Benton’s orgiastic obsession with people “of color.” Benton opens her piece with this (oomphasis mine):
On February 3 in Orlando, Florida, 160 women will toe the line at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon. It’s the most exclusive field of women’s American marathoning talent ever assembled, down from more than 450 participants in 2020, largely because of the stiffer qualifying mark of 2:37:00 for the full marathon and 1:12:00 for the half.
“Mark” should be “marks,” but I’m more interested in the other implied factors that Benton evidently believes helped reduce the size of the women’s Olympic Marathon Trials field from 450 four years ago to 160, a far more appropriate number, in 2024.
Then there’s Benton’s use of “despite” in “Despite a marathon qualifying time that’s eight minutes faster than the previous Olympic qualifying cycle, this year’s women’s field contains more runners of color than ever.” Benton apparently operates from the premise that the higher the quality of a marathon field becomes, the lower the percentage of runners “of color” that marathon is likely to include.
For those who just landed here from whatever planet Benton inhabits, the fastest female marathon runner in history not “of color” is Emily Sisson of the United States. Sisson’s personal best and national record of 2:18:29 places her 36th on the all-time performance list, a scant seven minutes and thirty-six seconds behind world-record-holder Tigst Assefa of EPOpia.
If this seems somehow too remote for Bentonian “thinkers,” then consider that two of the three women who represented the United States in the most recent Summer Olympics, Aliphine Tuliamuk and Sally Kipyego, are “of color.” Perhaps Benton feels inclined to derogate these two because they’re naturalized American citizens, as one of the highly tailored racialist obsessions she shares with other Wokish joggers is “Who are the fastest American-born black women marathoners of all time?” But what Benton actually wrote is that Tuliamuk and Kipyego did not, in her view, receive adequate media attention four years ago for being U.S. female Olympians “of color.” (She writes this as if any American marathon runners get, or deserve, widespread attention from the U.S. media, given this crew’s global standing as slow-footed galoots with occasional global-championships-medaling outliers.)
This is how people daft enough to embrace Wokism “think.” It doesn’t matter to them that two-thirds of the U.S. distaff Olympic contingent in Tokyo just two and a half years ago was “of color.” All that matters is that, in their opinion, this less-than-shocking shared achievement wasn’t publicly celebrated enough, and therefore doesn’t really count. Never mind that the purpose of the Olympic Marathon Trials is to assemble a three-person (ideally) Olympic Marathon squad, not provide substrate for diversity-obsessed innumerate and functionally illiterate slowpokes to generate yet more incorrect calculations and no-information data.
If this is still not ringing any bells—I trust my subscribers, but I never know who else is reading—the point is that runners “of color” have in fact established themselves to be highly capable marathon runners, and it’s not a new thing. Benton is a grifter who would have written exactly the trash she did for the paycheck regardless, but it seems that she’s, like, legit stunned by the concept of East African aerobic talent being importable to the United States in fully intact form.
Benton also puts the women “of color” she targets for input for her racialist pieces in uncomfortable positions, as many of them are simply not as driven by ethnic-based identity as goons like Benton need them to be. For example, Maggie Montoya’s input basically screams, "OK, I’ll play, but I don't actually care.” The subtext, if it’s even “sub” at all, in the following material is suggestive:
Montoya says she’s never struggled with feeling that she’s “the only” in her running career ... "I have not grown up super in-tune with my Hispanic heritage" ... Montoya says she didn’t initially hone in on these discrepancies ... She pointed to not growing up surrounded by the culture ... "I don’t speak the language and I haven’t been back to where I lived in Mexico in a long time."
Also, embracing racialist tropes are apparently okay if a potential victim of exclusion co-signs them:
Hsieh’s family encouraged her to prioritize academics over athletic activities when she was growing up (a common phenomenon among Asian American families, she says).
There are two things in play here. One is that an Asian-American woman is telling Benton explicitly that people should expect, for perfectly benign reasons, a lower percentage of Asian-American women to become elite marathoners than the percentage of Asian-Americans in the population at large. The other is that it’s hardly rare for American families of any ethnicity to encourage their kids to be students first and jocks second, especially when these kids are distance runners and hence extremely unlikely to make significant money as professional athletes.
In addition to Benton’s failure to understand basic math, it’s clear that she plans to write nonsense like this until 100 percent of every marathon field in the world consists of women “of color.” But we pasty-assed morons who write for unedited, unreliable publications know something even intrepid geniuses “of color” like Benton don’t, which is that elite American women’s marathoning is already rife in international influence. Sure, Benton is unimpressed by diversity unless this means fewer “white” people and more people “of color,” but hating “whites” is only limiting the range of her much-needed fandom.
The passage below captures Benton’s inattention to fact, biases, delusions about what others believe, and inability to even feign doing what she does for any reason besides easy money:
Many runners also haven’t forgotten when, just six days before the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed after being pursued by three white men (who were eventually found guilty of hate crimes motivated by racism) while out on a run in Satilla Springs, Georgia. The news cycle was slow to give the story attention, but it eventually sparked long overdue conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the running industry and community, as well as about representation in running media with regard to whose stories were being highlighted.
The murder of Ahmaud Arbery had nothing to do with the running community. Nothing. At. All. Anyone with integrity could, and still can, see this. And this is exactly why, in Benton’s view, “The news cycle was slow to give the story attention,” even in a media culture already gone hyper-Black Lives Matter by mid-2020. (Someone please tell this ridiculous imbecile that a news cycle is not something capable of serving as a conscious or even unconscious actor.) Racist scammers like Benton and Alison Desir—an even dumber, slower, fatter, uglier, and more openly racist joke than Benton—easily convinced the purple-haired white-guilt-riven shitlibs already by then controlling the running media to treat Arbery’s death as internal to running. This in turn has allowed unqualified, borderline-retarded laggards and hags like Benton and Desir to be repeatedly platformed and rewarded in recent years specifically for being mean, stupid, incorrect, and cravenly unaccountable pissbags.
Every post I write addressing another journalistic Hindenburg from this anti-white, anti-grammar inclusion-grifter will feature the same essential selective but illustrative biographical details until Benton makes herself available for public discussion about various claims she’s made on social media and in published articles over the past three-plus years.
Benton was one of many running pundits and quasi-journalists who in 2020 falsely accused charity-manic and historically creative long-distance-ufferfest director Gary Cantrell of racism on the basis of a patently ridiculous claim made by Ben Chan, a personality-disordered person posing as a runner. When I responded to this and someone shared my article on Facebook, Benton was among the commenters who declared by article worthless not on the basis of its content—which Benton and her co-harpies in the thread did not and probably could not read for comprehension—but because its author was a white male.
I’ve pointed out the dour but undeniably elegant symmetry in the same people inventing and relentlessly propagating an instance of racism being the most willing to mark themselves as racists. While this is only one of scads of impressively pathological ironies baked into Wokism itself (see also: improve women’s sports by loading them with males; improve life for crime-ravaged inner-city blacks by ceasing policing as well the meaningful prosecution of violent crimes in these areas), it’s also not the only self-debasing irony perpetrated by Benton herself.
In addition to writing me off as a racist loser because of my skin color (and gender, despite “man” being an empty concept to the Wokish), she dismissed my material simply because I publish on Substack while assigning her own work value simply because “reputable outlets” like Runner’s World and Outside’s e-rags had published it. She also literally writes about material that makes its way from rectums and vaginas into the outside world, often with difficulty or bearing funky odors and colors.
“Reputable outlet” simply means an outlet with a reputation, right? Including one for being an utter joke?
If Emilia Benton, certified multi-expert on a career ascendancy, wants to go on some moderated podcast with me and civilly discuss both the facts at hand and our most urgent philosophical differences instead of blocking me, I’m all for it. I’m putting that on the record to establish that in addition to being semi-literate at best; slow on the roads, yet pompous about her unambitious training; ignorant about basic training principles; and most of all a one-bitch parade of cross-eyed, stammering, and worsening self-owns is an undiluted, flagrant coward. Like the rest of the many characters who have made professional and citizen running a magnet for America’s most coddled and ineducable booger-munching lackwits, she will never, ever, ever take me up on this offer or any related offers to hash some stuff out face-to-(virtual)-face, like real women.