"Formula Kersee" has been the recipe for a foot-long turd sandwich in 2023
Harried and misguided pundits like Alison Wade will remain immune to the presence of the very problems they bemoan unless and until they actually start caring about those problems
The 2023 World Athletics Championships are over. Athletes from forty-six countries at the forty-nine-event competition in Budapest, Hungary grabbed at least one gold, silver, or bronze medal. The United States led the way with 29 total medals, representing 19.6% of the 148 podium spots claimed1. Jamaica was a distant second with 12 medals, the same number of gold medals won by U.S. athletes and relay teams.
As the event-by-event results reveal, sprinters, jumpers, and throwers accounted for all but one of the 29 medals Americans accumulated during the nine-day championships. Including the 800 meters and the 20K and 35K racewalking events as distance events, a total of 24 medals were up for grabs in that sector. Athing Mu’s bronze in the women’s 800 meters—exactly where I expected her to finish—was the only podium finish claimed by an American distance athlete.
This in no way represents a failing on the part of the American distance contingent. While (get this) some of them didn’t perform as expected while others shone brighter than anticipated—notably Zach Panning, who executed a near-perfect race in moving up from 39th at halfway to 13th at the finish of the men’s marathon—American distance runners are rarely if ever expected to seriously contend for top-three spots at global championships unless they are natives of East-Central Africa (and usually not even then). The U.S. has never had a better male 1,500-meter runner than Yared Nuguse, and has never had a better female 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter runner than Alicia Monson. These athletes are simply overmatched in competing against sublimely doped-up perambulation machines.2
Mu’s coach is Bob Kersee, who also coaches Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the holder of the women’s world record in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles. SLM missed the “major” 2023 World Championships altogether with a “minor” knee problem.
I touched on Kersee’s long and colorful history in February, in March, in June, and earlier this month, when SLM announced her withdrawal from Worlds. And all along, I was questioning the unconditional and vociferous support of “Formula Kersee” by women known for expressing skepticism about the value of male coaches in women’s and girls’ sports.
Among those who have long been calling for the effective abolition of male-on-female coaching is Alison Wade, who is synonymous with the Fast Women newsletter in the same way Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails were one and the same (sorry, Trentster).
Here is the evolution throughout 2023 of Wade’s take on the interface of Kersee, Mu, and SLM.
First, it’s helpful to understand that weirdos like Wade—a middle-aged white leftist woman—use “mental health” as a catch-all term to excuse everything and everything women they admire do under duress. It doesn’t matter to Wade that she wouldn’t have a newsletter at all if every pro athlete who experienced performance-related anxiety decided to just quit; even if a woman being paid to run doesn’t feel like running, it still comes first.
And it doesn’t help that as a rule, these women think that other kinds of women can be born with penises, and that men who have their penises removed can rightly call themselves women to the fullest oestrogenic degree. While prating on in an “athletes need to get their heads right” vein, Wade refers to the sage words of Nikki Hiltz, a “nonbinary” gender-grifter who defends the surgical mutilation of teenagers and whose recent 4:16.35 mile means that the American women’s record in that event is now held by someone who’s some combination of genuinely mentally ill and willing to pretend she’s nuts in return for money and renown.
The entire reason Wade has a significant following is explained by the bar graph below (source) and confirmed by years’ worth of accumulated survey findings.
Happily, the neuroses of these people are transmitted with ease to their children, so they’re probably here to stay.
Wade and her ilk only seem to see the abuse of female athletes when sexual predation is at issue. But what about men who seize on women athletes’ emotional vulnerabilities?
The Orange County Register ran a long, flattering profile of Kersee in late May, right after Kersee decided to withhold both Mu and SLM from the Los Angeles Grand Prix in what would have been the season opener for each. The reporter portrays Kersee as some kind of genteel post-personal-apocalypse mentoring figure now guided by booze-free, mental-health-first principles. Not quite Phoenix- or Lazurus-themed, but I bet the author of this hagiographic hand-job knows his epic Greek mythology tales. Or has at least read the Cliffs Notes versions.
The already reeling notion of a sainted Coach Bob Kersee is completely flattened and belied by the following passage:
So SLM turned to Kersee because she was emotionally overwhelmed, and he responded by publicly saddling both her and the already painfully recondite Ms. Mu with essentially unattainable goals. Sounds like a man with genuine empathy.
Who in their sober mind could even begin to believe that this guy prioritizes anything besides himself and his never-ending quest to be associated with setting and breaking obviously dope-aided records? I’d love it if someone would pester a first- or second-order harridan on my behalf for an earnest answer to this, with all references in the latest APA format.
Although I’m obviously not privy to anything about Kersee’s and SLM’s relationship, it appears for all the world that its genesis was a crude but time-tested emotional-manipulation ploy. Perhaps at times even an unconscious one, since this has been Kersee’s game for so long that he may not necessarily even know when he’s playing it anew.
Regardless, to me, this is an unconscious admission by SLM of having been classically emotionally manipulated by a man in power. Between SLM not grasping what happened to her and the OC Register reporting it as if it's just how coaches and athletes typically connect, it's almost hilarious.
Athing Mu, from the few interviews I have seen her do, seems like a genuinely sweet woman whose natural joie de vivre is unusually riven by the realities of world-class sports. That quality is not necessarily divorced from being a multi-time Olympic gold medalist, but I just don't think Mu really enjoys competing on a grand stage all that much. Sometimes, people with otherworldly talent just don't feeling like pushing themselves as far as the rest of the world believes they should, all the time. And it has little to do with the physical discomfort of extreme effort; it’s more an existential “Do I really need to spend more one minute my life trying to ‘beat’ people while running in circles to about the same spot we started from?”
Steve Holman, also an extremely likable American mid-distance runner, ran 3:31.52 for 1,500 meters in 1997—still #10 U.S. all-time outdoors, including the chronically shifty (but reputedly genial-to-all) Bernard Lagat as American. Holman had a very difficult time in championship races because he was admittedly at a loss as to how to respond when weird things, or even normal things, happened without his being exquisitely prepared to react. A natural killer can adapt to almost any type of race and still not lose focus or intensity, even if this doesn’t always produce optimal results. From Holman’s own accounts, after working with a sports psychologist, he had to learn to treat his own all-out efforts as a kind of rote, algorithmic process in which he simply flipped certain decision-switches when faced with certain scenarios, and his “choking” relented apace.
So, working on mental health doesn’t have to be synonymous with the “no mas” option U.S. gymnast Simone Biles chose at the 2021 Olympics, an episode that was queerly admired by both the liberal media and the American white-harridan class, with “the twisties” even earning a page on Olympics.com. ,
I wonder if Alison Wade and her delirious followers will ever figure out that a common link exists between Athing Mu and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone that might have something to do with their current travails. But if she can go on about how fragile Mu and other women athletes even while still being spellbound by Bobby Kersee, then she’s probably hopeless. Either she doesn’t really care about genuinely unhealthy, pressure-packed male-on-female track coaching—even when the results are not merely evident but nigh undeniable—and just wants to have more things to write about in her newsletter or she is abysmally stupid.
Wade’s newsletter—which for reasons both plain and idiotic is supported by New Balance despite her subscribers already having at least three ways to give her money themselves—usually hits her subscribers’ inboxes and the Internet at around 5 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time every Monday morning. Although Mu is the defending Olympic gold medalist in the 800 meters and won last year’s World Championships 800 meters in Eugene, Oregon, I’m sure Mu Wade will put a ditzy, positive shine on her 2023 bronze medal, along the lines of “Given that she has struggled to this point and was uncertain about even running in Budapest, a bronze medal is actually impressive” and whatever other post hoc tripe she summons as seasoning.
Maybe Wade will eventually ask herself why both SLM and Mu have been on the struggle-bus in 2023, above and beyond “injuries and setbacks happen.” It does not take a spectacular grip on reality to at least pitch some meaningful theories, such as “Bob Kersee is to women sprinters what Urban Meyer was to collegiate football players.”
Monday morning note: First, I've corrected a sentence not far above in which I wrongly put my guess about how Wade would react to Mu’s bronze medal in Mu’s own mouth. Second, Wade's reaction is now on the record:
Honestly, I’m impressed by how well she ran given how little racing she’s done this year. And hopefully finishing third here removes some of the pressure going forward.
A total of 49 events in theory implies the awarding of 147 medals in all, but a third-place tie in the men’s pole vault resulted in two bronze medals being awarded in that event.
Ethiopian-born Flying Dutchwoman Sifan Hassan is female, but those super-narrow hips and the way her pelvis articulates with her femurs can’t help but contribute to a more efficient get-along and her insane talent level and range.