How Nike purchased at least one dim, pliant "journalist" and his ramshackle multimedia festival
How Nike purchased at least one dim, pliant "journalist" and his ramshackle multimedia festival
Like others, Chris Chavez used to mine reports of malfeasance by Nike for clicks and was even almost a reporter. Like others, he has basically been paid to stop
In the spring of 2021, Nike co-founder Phil Knight used some of his estimated $54 billion fortune to launch Hayward Magic (disable your audio if you click on that link), promoted as a bias-free effort to raise the overall profile of track and field. Owing to Knight’s wealth and perspicacity combined with the dismal quality of contemporary running journalism and the warped perspectives of younger track fans, this project was assured of carrying out its intended, barely concealed mission: Making an already biased and incompetent slurry of a running media even worse at doing its job.
One arm of the project, Magic Boost, is described on its website as a collaboration between Hayward Magic (that is, one of many extensions of Phil Knight’s syphilitic ego and influence) and Chris Chavez, the sometimes-comprehensible and consistently unethical creator of a barrage of running-related podcasts, incendiary doofus-tweets, shifting headlines, and garbled noise, all of which many “running fans” apparently enjoy. Collectively, this pile of electronic kindling goes by Citius Mag, and I think Chavez even calls his own followers Citiots.
Knight has watched the climate of running coverage become one of unconditional and irresponsible flattery, as social media (as some may remember, originally called “social networking sites”) have brought people who used to be reporters and journalists into constant intimate contact with the people they write about. This wouldn’t be a crippling problem if today’s pseudo-reporters weren’t status-seekers and cowards by constitution. But virtually all of them are, and many of them are undisguisedly using their platforms to promote sexist and racist ideologies basting in personal resentments while using “social justice for all” as a knee-slapper of an excuse for all of it.
Skepticism has therefore not only gone missing; it’s been taken hostage. People who otherwise detest each other’s presence—e.g., Erin Strout and anyone with testicles—have become silent colluders in the nonstop distortion of facts and narratives, with each rendered less open to ridicule or career consequences in being part of a dishonest bozo-consensus (“It COULD have been the burrito! I support Shelby!!”).
Chavez is simply an idiot, with 700 cubic centimeters of his 900-cc brain devoted to purely reactive ego enrichment. Were his artless capering innocuous—say, part of a failed campaign to add humor to the sport, one of Chavez’ supposed goals in creating Citius Mag—it wouldn’t matter, because he’d be one more grinning fool with an inexplicable interest in a sport that requires discipline, planning, a willingness to listen to others when they say “Hey, look, here’s how you’re fucking this up.” He’s been a propagator of one lie-based dragging-fest (the Laz Lake pile-on launched by Outside Online smear-queen and multipurpose wretch Molly Mirhashem and her dedicated hatchet-man, Matin Fritz Huber) and the instigator of another (the “OMG this announcer is shaming women!” episode). Both “stories” were categorical ethical transgressions; the anti-announcer tweet was not only idiotic in its own right, but also amusing considering Chavez’ history of arguably perv-adjacent antics in a professional capacity for Flotrack.
But because running has attracted an undue burden of uncritically cheerleading waterheads; cheaters; tribalist grievance-dispensers; wall-eyed, fist-fucking egomaniacs; biology-deniers; dickless wonders; and pathetic blobs of self-victimhood who Insta-whine daily of the various things that force them to be, in fact, nonrunners, it’s all good. Anyone suggesting a level of discernment or moderation in any of this is plainly motivated by blind hate and senior-onset anti-progressive grudges.
I’ve mentioned Knight’s “magical” intervention in this space before. But for the weary, the chilling effects of Hayward Magic on the way Chavez began covering Nike are perhaps best summarized by a review of relevant Chavez tweets.
This link takes you to a list of tweets from Chavez’ personal account mentioning the word “Nike,” in reverse chronological order. You can scroll back as far as you like, but before the spring of 2021, Chavez was aboard the nearly full flight of pundits relentlessly hammering Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar for his poly-deviance, with Mary Cain being the primary if not sole tragic figure in the stories linked to these tweets.
You can also see Chavez side with those targeting Nike’s maternity policies. You can see him quote Desi Linden’s lament to Letsrun.com’s Jon Gault that Nike has, and uses, the power to create a sport-wide non-level playing field. You can see him take a small dump on Salazar’s former assistant, Pete Julian, who’s still with Nike today as the coach of the Union Athletics Club. You can see him, in essence, running for student council in being flawlessly aware of the pre-June-2021 running zeitgeist (this isn’t hard).
In fact, almost every tweet including the word Nike through January 2021 was negative. On January 26 of last year, Chavez announced that Nike was standing behind Salazar, accused of suborning doping and abusing his athletes in various ways.
Never mind what you know or believe about Salazar’s behavior; just know that Chavez was aware that Nike was manifestly unwilling to condemn it, and that Chavez was for years a vocal critic of Nike provided someone else started the conversation. He’s basically a myna bird with, as noted, a somewhat larger cerebral cortex than most organisms bearing feathers or scales.
Magic Boost was established in April 2021. This was just in time to prepare for a major blow to the Nike Oregon Project’s de facto reboot, the Bowerman Track Club. When Shelby Houlihan disclosed in mid-June of 2021 that she was five months into a four-year doping ban, Chavez, then with Sports Illustrated, immediately started running interference for Houlihan. He wrote an article with a dishonest headline and never acknowledged its correction—it was silently edited on the SI website:
This sums up Chavez’ Cornholio-style journalism career, and also why I now treat professional running like the subcultural sewer it has become, with brief lapses into frothy recaps of the latest exploits by uncaught dopers.
(You’ll notice me reporting a lot of transgressions by actors like Chavez more than once. This would be less likely, even unlikely to happen if these people weren’t cowards who ignore even diplomatic input from their critics and usually block them—and not just the critics who drop the occasional profane neologism or reference to unbangable harridans flipping the game-board into their posts.)
Chavez of course wasn’t alone in declaring Houlihan innocent of doping, which is exactly what extending any level of credulity toward her story was and is tantamount to. But he’s still the guy who only months before had acknowledged that Nike was actively supporting Alberto Salazar despite all the doping rumors, the Androgel tube, the whole deal.
I was told several years ago by a trustable source that when Salazar was with the NOP, he answered solely to Phil Knight. I’m wondering why Chris Chavez or anyone else would believe the situation with Jerry Schumacher is any different. Phil Knight doesn’t assemble teams of world-class distance runners so they can become good enough to just avoid being lapped in the 10,000 meters by EPOpians at global championship meets.
Chavez could have asked about some of these issues in his podcast with Knight last July, which aired five weeks after Houlihan admitted to being suspended from the sport. He probably really, really wanted to, but must have forgotten. (I’m kidding, obvi. The podcast was an advertisement for the newly mega-furbished Hayward Field and Nike bringing the 2022 World Championships to the U.S. for the first time.)
Chavez has had opportunities since to be vocal about uncomfortable news trickling out of the BTC camp. When Gabrielle DeBues-Stafford left the club in April, Kyle Merber, who writes “The Lap Count” for Citius Mag, had an e-mail exchange with DeBues-Stafford in which she stated that Shelby Houlihan’s unexpected and ongoing presence was the reason she left. When Chavez tweeted notice of Merber’s work from his Citius Mag Twitter account, he referred vaguely to the departed athlete’s “thought process.”
Here are personal tweets by Chavez containing “Bowerman Track Club” or “BTC.” (I didn’t bother looking thoroughly at the Citius Mag account; being running-only, that account would likely show an even more absurd contrast, but what I’d already seen was enough.)
This one has to qualify as an instant classic.
To the extent Chavez was ever willing to contradict a popular narrative, think creatively, or display backbone, those weakly sputtering traits have all been abolished when it comes to anything Nike-related that any Citius Mag-associated entity reports on. You’ll never see anything but whitewashed versions of negative events trickling out of the BTC cesspit. You’ll never see anyone ask, “Well, doesn’t that make Karissa Schweizer the fastest clean American women in the 5,000 meters by twelve seconds?” because of the giant bucket of shit—really more like a silo overflowing with plutonium-infused elephant dung—that anything in that line of inquiry would knock over.
Now return to the "Magic Boost" page to see who else has been bought (that Knight has bragged about, at least):
Boosters have had their work featured in CITIUS MAG, GQ, The New York Times, RunnerSpace, Runner’s World, SPIKES Magazine, Trail Runner Magazine, Women’s Running and World Athletics.
The BTC Zoom call disclosing Houlihan’s suspension that included Chavez also included someone from Letsrun, scatterbrained munchkin and mass-castration advocate Erin Strout (then with Women’s Running) and Alison Wade of Fast Women. Wade is smarter than Chavez and Strout put together, but has sacrificed most of her inherent intelligence at the altar of misandry and now functions at the same journalistically and cognitively impoverished level.
I have no idea if Hayward Magic is funding Fast Women; it’s a newsletter, not a corporate entity, and there is no assurance that the list in the quoted portion above was complete or is regularly updated. And although I’d like to believe that Wade would reject Hayward Magic money on principle, that’s really not something I believe anymore; it’s something I would have almost bet on five years ago that seems like it should make sense now, but doesn’t really. Wade has been totally pro-Shelbo herself no matter what kind of weaksauce protesting she does (a topic for an upcoming post that continues this story).
Phil Knight owns the sport. Back in the Steve Prefontaine days, athletes couldn't accept fuck-all except under the table—an understated theme in Without Limits—and now they can earn a living. But in addition to coming to all but own USATF, Nike has access to every athlete it wants, its own continual flow of exclusive proprietary technology, doping-control labs, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and its chin-stroking head Travis Tygart, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and a chunk of World Athletics itself.
Nike owns a corrupt sport in plain sight and owns the media coverage of itself, too. Why shouldn’t it? Fifty-four reminder, 54 billion is 54,000 times one million.
Letsrun includes at least one employee who embraced Houlihan’s fable, but I would rather have Jon Gault be wrong after drawing his own conclusions than be wrong because he was, in effect, paid off. Although no running media outlet run by sane, profit-oriented people would make Knight or Nike consistent targets, I think I can count on Letsrun to forever maintain independence. I believe the same thing about Sarah Lorge-Butler at Runner’s World. Among pundits with high profiles, it’s more or less Lorge-Butler and Letsrun against a bunch of asshats worn at unusually rakish gluteal angles.
The one thing I suspect Chavez wants to do most is put Letsrun under, and he plans to do this by hiding from criticism and churning out self-congratulatory material filled with so much jarringly bad prose that Robert and Weldon Johnson might as well have created him in a lab so they could announce to the world, “This guy and his troupe of babbling clowns is the best competition we’ll ever get.”
But as far as the de facto doping cover-ups go, I don’t think most Gen Z or Millennial running fans really care. Even most of the performance-oriented runners I know below a certain age these days would probably cheat if they were sufficiently confident of avoiding detection, and see doping controls as more a barrier to top performance than a means of trying to ensure fair play. But overall, the rush to excuse violations of athletic integrity come from two main sources: Older people who think they should have been more than they were in various faces of their lovelorn lives, and young adults deluded about how good they are or will eventually become.
Combine this with explicit incentives to mention doping at all, and an already shitbird-riddled sporting activity is in the process of losing whatever reporting guardrails it has retained into the current decade. It will be fun, in a way, to observe a bunch of gutless public-relations hacks on the take pretend they’re doing journalism work.