In reckless display of candor, Emma Coburn refuses to credit poor mental health for sucky Olympic race
Also, "the oppressed are incapable of poor choices" is the latest funhouse-mirror premise to infect the sports world
As we in the western U.S. learned in the early morning hours of August 4th, the evening of August 4 was not a banner night in Tokyo for Team U.S.A. in the Olympic athletics program’s two distance finals.
In the men’s 800 meters, Clayton Murphy wound up ninth and last after his signature strategy of running off the back was adopted by everyone in the field, including the leader. After Australia’s Peter Bol led through 200 meters in an already less-than-aggressive 24.9, Bol then jogged the next half-lap in 28.9 seconds without anyone passing him take the field through halfway in 53.8. Murphy, in last place at that point, ran his last lap in close to 52.0, good enough to…cement his caboose position. Normally, a last lap of 52-flat would be more than enough to win any 800-meter race; in this case, it didn’t move Murphy up even a single place.
I’m no expert in this event, but it appears that Murphy’s move-up strategy is usually predicated on a fast or at least reasonable opening lap, so that he’s not so much actually picking up the pace and keeping it there (this is rare even among conservative half-milers) as benefiting from the assured collapse of most of the field. When everyone is fresh with a lap to go, whoever wins seems to become a matter of timing and luck; even off a “slow” first lap, a half-miler only gets one serious move before any kind of sprint-like effort becomes more of a survival thrash, and given the rigors of the event, it’s not uncommon for half-milers to rig even after a tentative opening lap. It just seems too easy to have a shitty race even when exquisitely prepared. Sounds kind of like a lot of other distance events, come to think of it.
This disappointment had been preceded by about an hour by the worst steeplechase performance of Emma Coburn’s almost immaculate professional money-time career. When you’re as great an athlete as Coburn and deliver the goods with robotic reliability for years on end, you could run your worst-ever race and still have an objectively okay result—say, a fifth- or sixth-place finish in a World Championships 5,000 meters.
Last Wednesday, however, Coburn was pretty fucking far from okay. Even had her career been pockmarked by a legitimate pratfall or two—and remember, this paragon of consistency is undefeated in nine national steeplechase finals and medaled at the last three global championships—a 14th place that included a wipeout and was quickly upgraded to a disqualification would undoubtedly been the one that got away, and away…and right into the mixed zone.
After the race, Coburn offered this to reporters:
”If you ever tried to steeple when you’re wasted, it’s not easy. You hit a barrier less than every fifteen seconds, so it’s risky. You’re putting your life at risk. It’s like driving drunk, only there are no rules about it in track.”
Oops. Sorry, that was a close paraphrasing of Olympic skier and New Hampshire’s own Bode Miller’s comments in a 2006 60 Minutes interview. I guess you had to be there. Here are Coburn’s actual words:
“I’ve had (crappy) races in my career, but I’ve always been able to come to the big championships and show up. Yeah, this is terrible. It sucks to suck on the biggest stage.
“We’re professional athletes. Obviously, everybody has different experiences. But for, me, it’s about results.”
The second part of that, as Mark Kiszla explains in a Denver Post story, was Coburn’s take on the “What about the joy in the journey?” ethos that has pervaded these long-awaited Olympic competitions thanks to the neurotic airheads who have seized and corrupted the media to their disliking, and whose disruptive presence is especially strong in disciplines associated with body-slimming.
There is nothing controversial about Coburn’s post-race interview. She didn’t blame anyone else or even herself for her fade, which was hard to watch; she just said she had sucked on the track and that this was pretty much the only explanation she yet had. And why shouldn’t she be upset? She was demonstrably in or very close to 9:00 shape, the best form of her life. Her last three trips to global steeplechase championships had each earned her a medal. I’d be worried about her mental health if, in the immediate aftermath of this crushing disappointment, she’d flashed her widest, most winning Emma Coburn smile and congratulated herself and her fellow competitors just for having the courage to show up and put it all on the line on a worldwide television. During a pandemic, even!
But as Kiszla notes, these Olympics have been turned into such a festival of crying and soothing coo-coos from supposed sportswriters and sports fans that self-castigating comments that would have been taken at face value only a few years ago are now being universally vetted for evidence of excessive butthurt (if the athlete hasn’t racked up enough oppression points to express any) as well as the potential to cause excessive butthurt (if the athlete is female and white). I haven’t been looking at social-media chatter about this or anything lately, but in my recent one-week staycation in a different part of the county, I was exposed to some meta-chatter, and one line of grumbling seems to be of the “white girl probs” variety.
Yes, Coburn comes from a wealthy family whose construction firm has recently built a swarm of high-end commercial properties a couple of miles yonder. But if this status, which she didn’t choose, leaves her with an indelible stain regardless of her competitive record and demeanor, then I guess she’s just another casualty of structural racism.
I interviewed Coburn for Competitor Running after she won the steeplechase at the 2011 USATF National Championships. As she had almost two full years of eligibility remaining at the University of Colorado at the time, and the women’s steeple was still mostly a “That’s nice women finally get to do that, too” event, no one outside of the NCAA had really heard of her, so mine was really the first interview she’s given to what was technically a nationwide publication. I’ve seen her many times in person since, and while there are at least a hundred people in my cluster of ZIP codes who know her more intimately than I do, I maintain that any suggestion that she’s a prima donna—and in my Zen-like Twitterless existence, I may be opening a phantom can of worms, but I have my suspicions about how she’s been perceived for a long time—are unfounded.
But none of that even matters. If Emma Coburn decides to say she ran like a stir-fried monkey’s ass, that is her Truth and to deny it represents some combination of mansplaining and deplatforming. And considering how she ran, in this case, it should be our* Truth too.
And I don’t have to speculate about Coburn fighting a tide here. If you still don’t believe that the Wokish will keep pushing until every norm related to the communication of basic facts has been trashed, you eventually will. I mean, there’s nothing sensible to do but point and laugh at the demand by U.S. swimmer Simone Manuel for reporters to not interview professional athletes after disappointing performances. I suppose this dictum would apply even in situations where underperforming athletes are freely dispensing details about their own disappointment, sans provocation, as Coburn did. Everyone shut the fuck up before someone gets uncomfortable up here in the Olympic Village!
"It’s mentally and emotionally exhausting to coherently answer questions while trying to process the fact that people already saw you fall short of the goals you worked so hard for on the world’s biggest stage."
Manuel recommended that journalists get "better training" so they know when and if they should interview athletes and how to handle talking about certain topics, victories and disappointments with sensitivity.
What Manuel is insisting here goes far beyond her being a snowflake, and pretending that pro athletes sign sponsorship deals and other self-enriching contracts with the expectation that their feelings will never be hurt. She is in fact demanding that reporters don’t do their jobs—especially in situations when people like her have screwed up on the job themselves. (By the way, in a supposed age of female empowerment, why is all of this “treat us softly” whining and its eager accommodation being perpetrated by women? Most women I know are nothing like this, especially athletes, but almost everyone who is “like this” seems to be either female or undecided. The whole “movement” really does have an America’s Dumbest Criminals flavor to it, despite its heft.) The only reason such a flagrantly asinine idea isn’t being laughed out of existence is that today’s reporters are already obliging such requests without being lectured at by twerps like Simone Manuel.
Reporters, the ones who chose the profession for defensible reasons, should have responded to her high-and-mighty blather with “Fine, we never wanted the aquatic sports beat anyway. Talk about borrrrrr-ing.” Which it is. Swimming is a dull sport for gangly, physically gifted, dull-minded people, like Ryan Lochte. Sure, I’m impressed anyone can train in the exact same setting for hours a day, but this would seem to weed out most of the future Jeopardy! contestants. And has anyone else noticed that every stroke besides the crawl is a required handicap that makes these strokes tantamount to various kinds of racewalking? The only Olympic or otherwise fully sanctioned swimming races should be different distances of everyone’s best “When the gun’s fired, imagine you’re all being followed by a gigantic fuckin' shark” stroke, up to and including 10,000 meters. Maybe with actual sharks in the pools, if real reporters keep being chased off by meatheads like Manuel until only the self-promoting ass-kissers remain, like talking barnacles, to do these amazingly fragile athletes’ bidding.
Only part of the preceding paragraph is offered in jest.
Okay, not everyone has to go as far as the Buddy York school of punishing athletic failures, your own or anyone else’s. But the collective attitude of “We’re here to serve you because it makes us look great” on the part of today’s “journalists” makes such absurd and preening demands on the part of athletes unnecessary, even if it does add a touch of obnoxious synergy.
I’ve probably chewed through the most irritating parts of this already, but I haven’t gotten to the aspect I find the most instructive: Wokish sports reporters’ and journalists’ refusal to even question the dicta or the rationalizations of people who are openly declaring themselves to be in some way mentally unstable, or who at a minimum are making decisions that any true journalist would question in at least a soft-pedaled form. Traditionally, people suffering psychological flare-ups are not the people we* put in charge of making or enforcing broader culture’s rules and mores—even if many of these “mental problems” are invented by the projection-powered journos protecting the purportedly afflicted from innocuous harms.
Simone Biles’ a la carte approach to her Olympic events and the way that each of her moves was portrayed a masterclass of adapting to shifting conditions is only the latest manifestation of a media-wide refusal to question decisions by women athletes that are not as open-and-closed as tying a pretty morality bow on them makes them seem. Aliphine Tuliamuk basically wasting an Olympic marathon berth because she couldn’t wait any longer to have a baby drew no criticism that I know of, probably because this is one of about thirty third rails of journalism these days. I thought it was absurd that when someone preparing to race the marathon of her life was worried about the breastfeeding sitch in the Olympic Village, yet no one I know of thought—or dared— to ask, “Is that state compatible with top athletic performance?”
Then there’s this story about the former BYU runner (of course) who raced a mile one week before her due date, and the more widely known account of Lindsay Flach, who competed in the Olympic Trials heptathlon while 18 weeks pregnant. While I’m admittedly stepping way out of my lane when it comes to what bodies can and cannot do during pregnancy—I mean, maybe this stuff really is no big deal during uncomplicated pregnancies—it’s clear from the comments of the mothers-to-be that none of this is about “empowering women.” It’s about ad hoc personal challenges being framed as a step toward some greater good.
There is no need at this moment in history for pregnant women to prove to the world that they can still function. Stunts like Makenna Myler’s will just convince someone else that barely breaking six minutes for a mile at 38 weeks is low-hanging fruit, and she will shoot for a sub-5:30. All to show that, you know, “women” can do anything. In an age of endlessly inelastic demand for narcissism, such ideas really are the natural endpoint of these feats. Again, though, if it’s really all fine with the OB/GYN community, far be it from me to discourage anyone. (More forebodingly, the same “question nothing” idea within Wokism extends to shaming parents who question their not-yet-teenage children's inclination to use puberty blockers, but that’s a whole different bucket of cultural slime.)
These blossoming displays of remarkably lame journalism serve at least two purposes for their perpetrators. One: Always choosing, in effect, “She made the right decision for herself” over “Wow, no one saw that flop on the track coming” allows them to remain cowards, and if you aren’t yet convinced that one of the overriding traits of Wokish people is spinelessness, I can’t help you.
And two, more importantly, focusing nonstop on athletes’ admitted or presumed psychological problems convinces the frazzled joggers now holding most fitness-media jobs hostage that mental issues are, by themselves, a sign of greatness.
The syllogism goes like this:
1. Elite athletes sometimes fail miserably owing to imperfect mental health, but they’re still perfect.
2. I’m a bag of anxious depression and botch every story I write, usually on purpose.
3. Therefore, I’m still perfect.
The second and third of these, of course, are not meant to be explicit in these validation-seeking monologues disguised as op-eds. But these authors cannot see the forest they’re lost in despite having planted its scraggly trees themselves; it’s as mystifying to them as it’s plain to everyone else that journalism is now a mass exercise in Millennials putting their envies and resentments on blast, with no editorial oversight at all. The only grin-inducing thing about Wokesters’ relentlessly self-immolating conduct is how oblivious they are to the transparency of their real motives.
I have no doubt that this stupidity will continue unabated for a few years, enriching a few people and embarrassing and degrading the reality-based standing of thousands of others without their permission or knowledge. As more people start to catch on to what “critical theory” is and begin to add their voices to the small but stubborn chorus of complaints, the anti-journalism crowd will be further galvanized, figuring that evidence of having touched a nerve is evidence of having scored a rhetorical or forensic point.
In the meantime, I hope that genuine athletes like Coburn continue to describe themselves and their feats in whatever honest manner suits them. While a photogenic elite athlete lying and saying she feels better than she does might make a grotesque, nonstop liar like Latoya Shauntay Snell feel and appear more legitimate, it’s not a part of sports or its culture anyone needs.