Hostile posers and activists for passe' or nonexistent causes are running's (and everyone's) darlings

The sport's icons and protected figures now include belligerent and sessile eating machines and "courageous" pride-flag wavers pretending it's the 1970s

If asked to pick which of the corporate sponsors of undisguised cheater and sociopathic whine-factory Latoya Snell is the worst moral offender, I’d probably go with Strava. After all, while any ordinary citizen can determine using five minutes of research that Snell is not what she or her real and nominal supporters claim she is, Strava itself is where anyone can see that this “Verified Athlete” (and enthusiastic and effective cancellation-machine) simply sits on her ass, and often lies in her workout descriptions about what minimal activity she does perform despite the transparency of doing this right above her actual numbers.

Strava’s diabolical but wise chieftains are aware that the collective banter of its user base drives memberships, and that this banter is characterized by people fawning over others in the hope of being fawned over in return. Harmless enough on its face, with caveats (Strava’s most performative and like-hungry users are also its most reliable race-day flop-artists, although a crude AI program would be required to prove this).

Accordingly, Strava decided to play the role of high-school yearbook editor and designate Snell its most spirited user of 2022. How many candidates were considered for the honor or when the award itself was created is unclear.

This “award” of course does nothing for Latoya Snell. It’s not the same as cash, which is all Snell cares about. If anything, it may result in a net shift away from public adulation and toward public scorn—especially since the recent lie-fest she unleashed as part of getting Nate Imhoff punished by Brooks Running didn’t disappear as Snell expected, but instead was captured by an alert viewer.

Snell uses Strava to advertise that she's a cheating slug; Strava uses Latoya to feign concern for the mentally ill and partly sedate the pink-haired scolds and triumphantly self-loathing gender-studies professors who exert undue control over businesses worldwide thanks largely to enormous DEI grants from folx like Mill and Belinda Gates. (That switcheroo is to keep Mill’s team of online snoops at bay.)

The choice of award is interesting because, as I’ve pointed out before, Snell was actually a completer of marathons—and an increasingly prolific one—for about three and a half years. It’s when the sponsorships from HOKA and others started rolling in that Snell seemed to decide that these added up to a fitness retirement package.

More than three and a half years have passed since a boisterous yet dispirited Snell last finished a marathon, meaning that her retirement has now lasted longer than the period she spent doing marathons.

Sure, covid took a bite out of her official opportunities to “race,” but she spent the pandemic partying her way up to unprecedented globularity. She sat on her ass complaining that the world was against her even as it handed her more free shoes to enjoy as part of her golden parachute out of even trying to be fit and straight into a self-pitying swamp of psychotic and loserly outbursts. And she is 0 for 2 in official marathon tries since October 2021.

Because a major component of Snell’s chaos-generating strategy is to pretend that everyone criticizing her is focused on her intentionally dilapidated appearance and lengthening record of DNFs, I’ll say it again: It’s not that Snell is fat and doesn’t complete races. It’s that she portrays herself as battling adversities to remain a runner when the precise opposite is true—she visibly and proudly endorses the value of giving up and suffering increasingly from the predicted negative consequences of this choice and its palette of behavioral ramifications.

And she hasn’t just done this with running. She’s done this with her weight, a related but distinct concern. She’s done it with her alcohol consumption, declaring herself in January 2020 to be a sober alcoholic only to subsequently upload various videos and pictures of herself proudly boozing it up. She rages against phantoms and emanates sickness. She sanctifies blaming a curiously generous world for her disgraceful choices and vilifies earnestness and truth-telling.

While a fair number of her regular followers may remain deluded, I’m certain than many are not. She has tapped into a reservoir of grimness and painful surrender that doesn’t take root in people destined to become real runners, but apparently captivates a cadre of citizens I never even knew existed before 2019 or so: People who don’t merely want to be recognized for trying and sometimes failing at something that doesn’t come naturally to them, but who fail on purpose, glorify rule-breaking and deception, and emit slobbering condemnations of whatever malign force structured long-distance running unfairly. And as Snell demonstrates, the activity is indeed discriminatory toward naturally large people who, in the moments following critical daily decisions, sit indoors and bitching about why they can’t move rather than exercise and burn off some of the static and shame.

I’ve tried to relate my own experiences with the nurturing of resentments to those of an imagined Snell supporter on Instagram. In multiple ways obvious to myself and others, I’ve embraced giving up and given the finger to certain aspirations, institutions, and people in recent years. And I can easily point at various events far beyond my control that have worsened whatever burdens my prickly immate psychology imposes at baseline. But I have difficulty declaring that a world with newly gruesome norms provides license to lie for a living, and to hope to forever ride whatever macabre sociopolitical momentum allows me to benefit from that lying—all while lashing out at anyone who publicly reports on my antics. A normal person would find this lifestyle stressful.

Strava was not only helping cement its status as a properly Wokish company with the “award” it gave Snell, but also telling anyone who questions its endorsement of Snell to kiss its ass. And as usual, no one with a name will take credit for this stunt; it’s just “Strava,” as the people responsible for Snell being part of the team are as cowardly as she is. And I bet those cowards all have excuses—in their minds, as they sit far away (or across Boulder) reading this.

No one from Strava would ever be able to explain—in a basic, moderated, one-on-one discussion in which fisticuffs were mostly banned—how Snell is supposed to exemplify a sincere effort toward physical fitness or mental wellness from any perspective; how a newcomer of any size, age, color, creed or religion is supposed to divine motivation from someone who barely moves and routinely posts pictures of herself taking a dump, as if this is a startling result after an endless spree of catastrophic overfeedings and overboozings.

Would Strava chairman and co-founder Mark Gainey be able to rationally support his company supporting a gaslighting fraud, or would be look uncomfortably over my shoulder while muttering something about not criticizing black people on principle? How about Strava CEO and co-founder Michael Horvath? I wouldn’t be surprised if neither of these two has even heard of Latoya Shauntay Snell.

I’d be more inclined to learn what one of these two abject airheads has to say.

Bousquet’s “About” statement on LinkedIn:

I love building teams of amazing people. I believe that by being real, by not over-engineering or over-corporatizing HR, and by finding and supporting great people -- work can look and feel more like the best parts of life. (And I also like to laugh a lot.)

And every good People Officer needs a Talent…something to fill the people ranks, so this one, who may be old enough to drive, is likely involved in the celebration of Snell’s greasy and morbid trolling of the sport.

My career has reflected what I believe about life and how I try to live it, which is trying new things and searching for new opportunities with a growth mindset and curiosity. Throughout my studies and early career roles, my fascination with people and human behavior led me to build a career in Talent Acquisition and People.

These people aren’t trying any harder than Snell is. But they’re making a lot more money than she is while also being dirtbags. And assuming the information on this page is accurate and current, I wonder what Zip and Chizzy might have to say—together or separately, but as “Zip and Chizzy” is tailor-made for a bad comedy team, together would be better—abour how Snell sets a proper example for aspiring running newbies trying to break free of, not internalize, the chronic excuse-mongering that’s largely responsible for where they already are.

As anyone of a certain age who actually runs knows, running has long provided a far more progressive environment than the U.S. as a whole. The idea that fat people or people of color have been purposely marginalized is not merely wrong but backward. Even during culturally fraught times in proudly anachronistic parts of the country, I have seen black people, gay people, Muslims, and various others treated as equals at races and groups runs. If not everyone at these events agrees at a granular level with what others bring to the table personally or politically, yet these events have always been welcoming, then what exactly is there to improve?

Nothing, really. But Wokism is here to stay, and it makes marvelous and endless scamming substrate for people who happen to have been born both statistically less prevalent and character-enfeebled. And Strava wouldn’t lose a significant fraction of its membership even if it designated Ye a “verified athlete” (albeit a shoeless and naked one); too many people depend on Strava and its quasi-unique environment for happy vibes, and most members pay little to no attention to whatever insincere progressive homilies the company chieftains are Wokishly unfurling for the next ad hoc holiday.

That gibbering jackoffs and anti-white racists—“athletes” who loll about in expanding states of gaseous decomposition while awaiting the critical Instagram notifications that define their wayward lives—like Snell attract any corporate love whatsoever is pungent enough. But climate-scammers and rainbow-flag grifters are thriving mightily in the running industry as well, just as they are in other sectors around the globe. I’ve touched on a few of them before, and regarding how much validity I plan to assign the “running isn’t welcoming of the brand new gay” claims of swindlers like Ryan Montgomery, here’s a preview of what’s next:

Also, last Sunday, I talked to Derrick Lytle of The Juniper Lab again, this time for close to three hours. The first half of that conversation—which centers on what “free speech” means and why some of us are more concerned than others about the rapid dissolution of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution—is on Apple Podcasts, the Juniper Lab Substack page, and YouTube. The second part will be uploaded soon to all three locations no matter how much everyone hates the first part; meanwhile, dissenters are invited to cram their objections into the nearest Christmas stocking, patiently document them in the comments below under lame anonymous handles, or all two.