How is Athing Mu supposed to be sharp for U.S. Nationals in an unfamiliar event when she's been idle for a year?
Her absence from competition and the yutzes' excuses carry undeniable echoes of this time in 2021
Bob Kersee is a sprint coach known to have been so openly dirty since his emergence in the 1980’s that no one even bothers to mention it anymore. It’s tempting in this age of supposed alien spacecraft being kept in U.S. warehouses to attribute this to superstition; maybe everyone assumes that if no one mentions Kersee and steroids in the same sentence, then none of Kersee’s athletes will have banned drugs coursing through their impeccably honed bodies, much less test positive for same.
But that isn’t it. It’s that, given everyone and everything Kersee has touched and a swipe of Occam’s razor, that discussion will have to be tabled for at least five years, barring unexpected interventions, or else it would upend the sport. Allyson Felix, mother and athlete, on drugs? Nuh-uh. We’ve all seen her pray, and we know she meant it. PEDs are for suckers with no direct line to the LORD.
Felix is retired now. What’s happening today is that Kersee is coaching the two greatest American female superstars in track and field, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Athing Mu. Both are young—McLaughlin-Levrone is 23, while Mu turned 21 on June 8). Kersee has always preferred to work with women.
A profile of Kersee last month in the L.A. Times does not mention steroids or banned substances once. It only mentions Kersee’s most notorious athlete, 100-meter- and 200-meter-dash world-record holder Florence-Griffith Joyner, in a photo caption, because it would have been impossible to haul Flo-Jo—who died in her sleep in 1998 at the age of thirty-eight—into the piece without raising at least the specter of illicit methods and methodologies.
The distaff pundits of running are of course not only unwelcoming of this arrangement, but positively agog over it. In a July 2021 tribute to Flo-Jo in Women’s Running, Johanna Gretschel disposes of the entire steroids issue with a “Through all the rumors, Griffith Joyner never failed a drug test,” noting that the supposed main controversy over her world record in the 100m (10.49) was the absence of a properly functioning wind gauge. Nice red herring, Jo, or maybe you really just aren’t into research, a tool journalists once relied on startlingly often.
Gretschel also noted Kersee’s genius in an piece from last January about McLaughlin-Levrone. And Alison Wade of Fast Women, who has never met an American doper with ovaries (real or pretend) she didn’t like, can’t get enough of the Formula Kersee (seriously?) squad updates.
In the upside-down world occupied by running’s purported feminists, the very same people who in March were praising Kara Goucher’s book The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running and triumphantly upvoting its core, urgent message—that pro running is soaked with drugs and shady coaches, many of whom prey specifically on women—are already pretending they pretended to give a shit for a second there, and have resumed their usual gibbering and blurting about how inspiring and incredible all these wildly fast ladies are, yeehaw.
Mu is the American record-holder over 800 meters (1:55.04 at the Prefontaine Classic in August 2021) and the defending Olympic and World champion in that event. She has a bye into the 800 meters at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary, which kick off on August 19. The plan, per Kersee, is for Mu to run the 1,500 meters at the USATF Outdoor National Championships, which begin in less than three weeks at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon.
It’s unclear whether Mu plans to double in the 800 meters and the 1,500 meters at Worlds if she qualifies for a U.S. spot in the longer event in Eugene. But she is woefully inexperienced at the 1,500 meters, in which she has a personal best of 4:16.06 from April 2021. In February 2022, she passed through the 1,300-meter mark of the Millrose Games mile on pace to run around 4:25, or close to 4:06 for 1,500 meters, before dropping out after a couple of runners passed her.
More alarming is the fact that Mu has not raced since July 22 of last year.1
Mu has now used covid-19 as an excuse for no-showing at two meets: Last May’s Prefontaine Classic and the L.A. Grand Prix last month.
And for this year’s Millrose Games, rather than risk posting another DNF, Mu chose a DNS instead.
Maybe Mu is just fragile for her talent level and doesn’t enjoy competing unless she believes she is extremely fit or can at least win. But this string of absences from meets in conjunction with highly questionable fitness undeniably smacks of tidings from two springs ago, when no one could figure out why Shelby Houlihan had yet to compete in 2021.
Houlihan, we* would soon learn, had in fact been suspended since January. And I’m sure her agent, Stephen Haas, knew this as well when he told Letsrun.com Houlihan had a lil’ niggle, nothing to really fret over. It looks like that fucker is still in business.
I’m putting this one in “unlikely, but don’t call it far-fetched” territory: Mu may have run into something akin to a urinary-tract infection, specifically a urine infection, and her team is now concealing and bargaining to overturn this. They are entering her in meets for show, with meet promoters oblivious to Mu’s true circumstances, and fully intending to withdraw her because she’s in fact ineligible pending an appeal.
This is probably nonsense; for all I know, even entering a meet of any consequence would trigger a response from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. But maybe not.
A more mundane and likely scenario is that Mu simply hasn’t been able to get herself ready to race—physically, mentally or both— and is not disclosing this because it would do her absolutely no good to do so. Maybe she’s overwhelmed, having won two global championships and set a U.S. record well before her 21st birthday. And my God is she beautiful to watch; she really is one of a kind, appearing to be loping at 57-second 400-meter pace, the female answer to Wilson Kipketer, owner of the silkiest stride in half-miling history. She’s the kind of runner that keeps old-timers watching while dumbfounding the uninitiated.
But.
You have to hand it to the harridans for their determination to rely on the same set of empty, consoling excuses no matter how often these get swept into the shitbin.
McLaughlin-Levrone, the world-record holder in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles (a hilarious 50.68 seconds) had just been defeated in Paris in a flat 400 meters (which she covered in a reasonable 49.71 seconds). I am not sure what the point of mentioning Mu was other than unconsciously disclosing a fear that Mu might not be ready for USATF Nationals, Keely Hodgkinson (1:55.77 in Paris) at Worlds, or both.
On the matter of young female athletes dealing with external pressures, Wade used to fret about this while adding to it herself and making excuses. Now she just adds to it without bothering with excuses, even while continuing to acknowledge the pressure-factor elsewhere.
Mu is an athlete with the sheer raw talent to shocking things. But I would not bet on her magically snapping out of her rut at USATFs. She appears to possess the option of skipping the meet outright and still running the 800 meters at Worlds, and according to Kersee, she may run at least one relay along the way (Budapest ‘23 will feature a mixed 1,600-meter relay). But if she doesn’t run in Eugene at all, it will signal that, for one reason or another, her career is in grave turmoil.
The original version of this post stated that Mu competed in the Michael Johnson Invitational in late April, “a solo effort against nobodies” that produced “a relatively grim 2:02.07.” Thanks to a reader’s input, I learned that this race in fact took place in April of 2022.