HOKA and other companies are gladly sponsoring a sociopathic hate show
How do running businesses think that a racist, non-running sponsee who belittles anorexics will help draw more people into running?
The timing of another ill-conceived Women’s Running article by its chief propagandist, Erin Strout, almost couldn’t be better. Resorting to the usual “Some people are talking about this” rationale for deciding what’s important, Strout starts her piece with “Over the past three years, some of the biggest news in women’s sport has exposed abusive coaching practices.” Generously, she says that much of this “malpractice,” tacitly attributed to men, is rooted in ignorance rather than malice. She also proposes that most of what’s known about female sports physiology comes from studies of men, which is only true if you accept what your interview subjects tell you and are too lazy or opinion-driven to track down research studies or accurate information in general.
The article describes a study underway at Stanford University dubbed FASTR and whose chief investigator is Megan Roche, M.D., also a coach. Among the metrics of interest are “body image, self-compassion, and perspective on longevity in the sport” among younger women. One of the goals of the project, in the somewhat twisted words of the study’s clinical director, Emily Kraus, is to show just how outdated and unreliable the research done on women athletes by Boomers and Gen Xers is. In a demonstration of the seriousness of this enterprise, one of the women enrolled in the study is Latoya Shauntay Snell, whom Strout describes as “an ultrarunner, chef, and advocate.” What Snell allegedly advocates for evidently isn’t important enough to warrant inclusion.
I agree with Strout that the abuse of women runners is a serious problem. Even if Wokism and its lazy ways has resulted in no more than a manic and publicity-driven chasing of higher-profile targets by high-profile athletes, the number of high-school girls (and boys) receiving incredibly bad coaching from mentors of all genders remains depressing. Typically, improper workouts are an issue, but rarely the worst issue. Coaches play favorites, and some fool around with minors if they can get away with it. Everyone else in running hates the fact that these coaches exist, as they not only do lasting damage to young people, but add fuel to the demented if understandable belief by Team Strout that men simply shouldn’t be in the business of coaching female athletes at all.
But anyone who believes that adding Latoya Shauntay Snell to any study of this sort will increase the body of scientific knowledge about female athletes, contribute to improved perceptions about body image, or drive things in the direction of compassion is either too lazy or too unscientifically minded to perform any useful investigative work in this area.
Snell, a cross between a between hapless cartoon villain and a real-life antihero, must hold the distinction of being the most celebrated marathon and ultramarathon runner in history who is no distance runner at all and never really was. And Rosie Ruiz doesn’t count, because she was “celebrated” only in becoming instantly and permanently relegated to infamy for her attempt to steal Jackie Gareau’s win at the 1980 edition of the Boston Marathon, a 26.2-miler in Massachusetts once respected for its qualifying standards and overall vibe as well as its top-notch fields.
Snell is a stone-cold bullshitter, a poly-oppression grifter no more widely regaled by distance runners now than Ruiz was over forty years ago, and is arguably even more sociopathic. Yet she has been celebrated materially in the form of unwarranted sponsorships, partnerships, and acclaim from the companies that make gear for runners, distant relatives at best of Snell and her core followers.
But the reason most people watching the Snell show at all closely can’t stand her is simple: She’s not just a cavorting fraud, but mean. This is becoming too evident for all but the most committed anti-white racists and “burn it down” chaos-impresarios within the running community to ignore. And inevitably, this will reflect poorly on the companies that promote the show, too.
This “professional athlete” who wobbled through 5K of the 2021 Boston Marathon in just under an hour before quitting has a startling number of sponsors, among them HOKA, REI, Trek, Superfit, and Amazon (which scored her Boston Marathon bib, despite over nine thousand qualified runners being rejected by the race on the basis of an overcrowded field). And Snell being no athlete at all—and not even trying to hide her lies about her long-dormant almost-running; more on that below—is actually among the weaker arguments for blasting these companies for their marketing choice.
Snell recently decided to take a crack at white people who develop eating disorders, perhaps not fully cognizant of just how many people’s tragedies she was glibly trivializing. (I won’t link to any of this clown’s videos, but the tone and cadence of her voice reminds me of the long-forgotten Bullwinkle T. Moose.)
And in case you think that was merely sloppy wording rather than incendiary yammering, here’s how she dealt with a skeptic:
Note how easy it is to get away with dodging serious questions about your character when you’re the lord of your own social-media account, and can make such input and its contributors vanish. Well, not that a person’s follower number dictates the worth of his or her question, but I have far more than ten people reading my posts, and I’m using my big shiny brain to invite Ms. Snell to pull that move in a conversation with me moderated by a third party, with the whole thing on the record and not alterable by any of the participants.
And speaking of trolls, Snell seems to have been sending a few my way lately, probably because my chronicling of her nonsense is becoming increasingly prominent. I only just noticed this myself, but between Snell’s unusual name, her limited renown in the overall scheme, and the number of times I’ve celebrated her on Beck of the Pack, my posts about her rank high in Google searches of her. I’m sure this presents a problem for her in terms of public-image management, because she can’t do a damned thing to keep me from writing about her besides stop being a jerk, and that’s not in her plan or really even possible. (The most common refrain from Beck of the Pack trolls is some version of “A white man can’t criticize a black woman.” That is psychotically dumb on its face, but there must be some level of exotically verboten behavior at which even the most ardent Wokish people would never invoke this imaginary form of immunity.)
Snell doesn’t have an eating disorder. At least not one she hasn’t injected with a combination of steroids and grifter growth hormone (gGH) so she can monetize it. She does boast a host of personality disorders, and they do involve her mouth, but anyone who does this is simply amplifying a swindle, not struggling in earnest. Would anyone believe that someone doing keg-stands and Jell-O shots on Instagram and saying “I am battling the disease of alcoholism every day” was remotely sincere? Especially if he had a dozen donation buttons and got the most props for his most inebriated hijinks?
Since one of the victims of Wokism is the abstract quality known as irony, it shouldn’t be surprising that Snell wound up on the cover of the final 2020 issue of Runner’s World as an anti-harassment figure, long after Derek Murphy of Marathon Investigation had publicized both her lying about her running and her far more troubling responses to his privately asked questions. This is like the CEO of McDonald’s showing up in a series of 30-second spots to promote the benefits of a vegan lifestyle.
Snell’s entire persona is based on harassment, shaming, venom, and lies. There is not one good or remotely serviceable quality about her that I can see. She’s just a bad person.
This partnership between RW and Snell didn’t end well, by the way, reportedly because Snell wanted money—all she ever wants is money and she'll do anything besides actually run to get it—and RW wasn’t moderating posts about her on its Facebook page to her liking. Without knowing the details, I credit RW with at least some version of perspicacity despite screwing up badly in the first place by putting Snell on its cover.
Her “For whites, talking about eating disorders is a privilege” also isn’t Snell’s first trip down the lane of racialist insults. After Murphy caught her lying about running the entire distance at the Mardi Gras Marathon and contacted her for her side of the story before writing a single word about her on his site, Snell told him “Who the fuck are you bitch? Take your Quaker Oats ass off my page.” Snell is a sociopath, so this is how she akways reacts when caught in a lie. She also compared me—not by name, as she dodges me and my words like crazy— to a Canadian cartoon character last year, but as I said at the time, I can’t fault her for that. I see me in Caillou, too.
And a variety of pundits who get feisty specifically over examples of body-shaming have touted the glories of this morbid idiot. Running is a fairly small community if you strip out the pure noisemakers on the sidelines, and Lindsay Crouse, another flamboyant liar and grossly substandard human being, has been among those extending succor and sympathy to Snell for all the “abuse” she takes.
Snell, like any liar and cheater who wipes his or her ass on things running-related, has demonstrated countless times that she has earned not props but a ceaseless stream of jeers and derision. And I want to make it abundantly clear—because this seems to be a real sticking point for at least a few of Snell’s defenders—that this has nothing to do with Snell being slow, fat, black, or profane. She also says she’s queer and suffers from a wealth of disabling conditions (the only time Snell trusts doctors, apparently, is when they suggest she’s enfeebled in some new way).
Those traits and schemes are the defenses Snell uses to keep people from looking under the hood and discovering that she’s the polar opposite of the kind of human any sane company would use to market a fitness—or any—product, service or brand. She has demonstrably lied about various aspects her days as a quasi-runner, about a GoFundMe-type account she opened in 2020 to raise money to fight a nonexistent legal issue, about being in recovery from alcohol abuse, and about playing it safe during the pandemic.
Anyone can look at the most plainly evil clown and observe, “No one has the right to say she can’t represent companies despite that mouth on her.” That’s debatable, but when a runner lies about his or her running, then he or she categorically has no business being viewed as a delegate of the sport. That door slams the fuck shut.
Anyone who argues against this point either needed better parents or should have listened more closely to the one(s) they had. Running whole courses and reporting your times accurately is the one bar anyone in this most basic of sports can clear. Anyone. Most would do so even if trying to trip over it, because most runners are honest about their running. Even runners who bozo the hell out of everything else in their lives.
Snell is undeterred by any of these considerations. She has been relentlessly pushing a fiction about the number of running events she has completed—all or nearly all of which occurred before a procession of woke-washing companies decided to start claiming her as a token. And she keeps getting away with it, because either none of these companies do any homework or they’re happy to go along with Snell’s fables.
It takes little time or detective skill to establish that the true total of marathon finishes Snell has to her credit is 13. Either MarathonGuide.com or Athlinks.com suffice for the job. (On Athlinks, you’ll see 15, because one NY City Marathon result was duplicated, and another event was virtual.)
Yet Snell has been rattling of “25+ marathons and over 200 total races” (and per Athlinks, the latter total is nowhere close to 200) from the outset of her pseudo-fame. It’s one of her many bullshitter’s mantras.
Here’s HOKA giving her lie a boost.
When Snell catches the scent of a friendly or at least easily duped Instagram commenter, she’ll expand the lie even further.
Because her immorality has no apparent floor, Snell will keep up this and more until someone forcefully challenges her on her lying in a forum where she can’t use block-buttons to keep truth-tellers at bay. She even claimed to raise $20,000 for black organizations on her birthday in 2020—a heartening move only Snell is apparently aware of.
But the worst aspect of Snell’s sick-minded game is her bullying of her entire classes of people, and the “white people with EDs" episode was only the latest in a grisly multi-season “fuck you all” production. Consider, among many possible examples of white women with a public history of eating disorders, Mary Cain. If I am not mistaken, these two are on the same side when it comes to “body positivity.”
Who besides me is waiting for the podcast with Snell and Cain where the two of them litigate whether eating disorders are a bed of roses if you happen to be lacking sufficient melanin? Imagine a podcast with these two in which their words toward each other were honest and unfettered by fear or anything else. If you are about Mary Cain, which Erin Strout and virtually everyone in the sports community claims to, then how is specifically platforming a sneering wrecking-ball like Snell supposed to ease the pain of Cain and the countless women and men who have been knocked around by eating disordered and happen to have been born with paler skin than others?
That example highlights the limits of Snell’s bullying: She is petrified to directly confront the few people with names who are unafraid of her bombast or being tagged as racist fatphobes for calling her out. She can delete adversarial input from the throne of her Instagram account and jabber on about her courage to an incurious or equally unethical podcast, but her bellowing stops where genuine questioning begins.
This craven aspect of Snell’s act may not be obvious to her fans, or even to people who see only her antics and not any criticism of it, but she is desperately averse to genuine confrontation. For all her bluster, she refuses to answer to anyone with a name for any of her lies and rancid squawking. She was invited to do a podcast with Murphy and his co-host, Scotty Kummer, and despite her demonstrated yen for running her mouth on the record, she declined.
But “all bark and no bite” isn’t quite right, because when someone has corporate backing, however dumbfoundingly inappropriate, it tends to legitimize her presence, however overtly obscene. Snell is not “a woman asserting herself in the fitness space” or “a person of color and size redefining what it means to be an athlete.” This is an overgrown, petulant, cackling child whose only confirmed disability—being a blunt-force asshole—is being rewarded and treated as an asset to Snell and her community (whatever that is).
This is the inevitable result of a collision between unexamined good intentions, corporate laziness, and the presence of a given number of eager grifters in any subpopulation of humans. Add in morbid curiosity, fear of confrontation, and the threat of being cancelled for some kind of “-ism,” and it’s easy to see the path this shitshow has taken. But hindsight is one thing; absolutely no one I know saw this total abandonment of institutional ethics coming.
I keep returning to the main reason supporting oppression-grifters pisses me off: The broadly persistent illusion that people like Snell are part of some societal healing and growth moment, movers of a tide that lifts all underrepresented boats, when it’s clear that they’re just opportunists who don’t care about the communities they purport to represent and if anything act to harm public perception of those communities.
Consider how hard it is to find anyone who acts like Snell does, period—black, white, or chartreuse. Then consider how many deserving candidates for fitness-product sponsorship you have to ignore if you are looking for a plus-size woman of color and settle on Snell. If it looks like an intentional hunt for the most disruptive, profane, pseudo-powerful mascot, it’s probably because that is precisely what’s in style in the age of Wokism, which seeks to “problematize institutions” and “tear down power structures” at any cost, since these are all erected on the scaffolding of Whiteness.
(If you’re wondering who Snell pretends and aspires to be, here’s a great example, and 2018 was not a cultural epoch ago.)
Never mind Latoya herself, though. She has every right to be her authentic—i.e., completely contrived, demented, chortling, and comprehensively adversarial—self. But companies and media outlets actively amplifying her presence, lies, and bank accounts despite her continual episodes of shaming other runners is something I can’t get past. In the twenty-plus years I spent contributing to the previous versions of progenitors of these same outlets, absolutely none of this would have been remotely permissible, and some of the people I worked for and alongside are still in the business. Given access to a glimpse at the industry’s future in 2000 or 2010 or even 2015, we would have been scratching our heads at these covers and partnerships and mumbling, “Just who the hell are they marketing toward? What are they selling and to whom?”
It boggles the senses that HOKA dropped its support of the New Jersey-New York Track Club in 2020, yet has kept this character in the fold. I want to ask, seriously, “Why?” But there are no answers other than the sadly obvious one, which is that the marketing representatives for the various companies that support Snell are substandard, weak humans just like she is. It’s not that they don’t know, or know and don’t really care; whoever these people are, they love it.
The fools directly responsible for Snell’s scam succeeding don’t have to answer to me or anyone, any more than Snell has to. But you can pepper them with questions anyway. If you happen to know any Wokish people in the marketing departments of HOKA, REI, Trek, or any of Snell’s other enablers and catalysts, direct them toward this post and ask them what they have to say about the issues it addresses. I mean, I can’t do any more of this hard work myself; I’m exhausted.
It’s amazing how much I continue to enjoy running while managing to complain about what a wreck everything has become at the sport’s promotional level. Since I also like to complain about Boulder, I’m going to bring my phone with me for a run on a standard route and take some pictures of some of the everyday things Rosie and I see, and probably leave some of the reporting to her. I mean, I’m just wiped.
A bonus inclusion: Someone familiar with the author’s thinking concocted a miniature version of a Lindsay Crouse bingo card. Crouse has written only four columns so far this year for The New York Times, and I keep waiting for her to write one about Elaine Gu dripping with envy.
