Neurotic, unaccomplished joggers continue foaming at the crotch about uniforms designed solely for superior athletes

Editors should at least supply honest headlines for these sorry, projection-rich pieces—say, "Anything that reminds me others are more desirable is unfair"

Salon is a fancy-looking group blog with a design and style modeled after left-leaning legacy-media outlets and content aimed at legacy-admission-caliber brains. As a rule, the blog’s contributors and readers are younger adults who have spent their well-cushioned lives trying to frame their own class privilege as intellectual prowess and any desirable ascribed characteristics they possess as consciously pursued and well-earned achievements. One of these forms of self-delusion is inherently proposing that the mindsets of women such as themselves who default to the most neurotic takes possible on every event and the mindsets of tough, talented female athletes share significant psychological overlap.

A former scrub-level collegiate runner named Gabriella Ferrigine has unfurled a take for Salon on the manufactured controversy surrounding one of the track-and-field uniform options Nike is offering for athletes in the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.

As most Beck of the Pack readers are probably aware, only a small percentage of Americans get to compete on Olympic track-and-field teams—not even 10 or 15 percent every year, I’d guess. Heck, maybe not even one in a million. Nevertheless, a raft of knock-kneed joggers and even a few of corporate running’s more esteemed racist, slovenly bullshit-factories have tried to use the most risqué of the uniform options capitalize on their own body shame.

Ferrigine’s other work for Salon has focused on the complex and intellectually challenging popular-culture scene—e.g., washed-up boy-band and girl-band crooners—and she’s plainly a fan of Jimmy Kimmel, a talentless, fuming hack even compared to late-night television’s half-dozen other brain-dead, pro-mRNA jabs, pro-child abuse, anti-science, pro-war propagandists. She frequently bitches about the ravages of sexism in Hollywood.

With this palette in mind, you almost don’t have to read Ferrigine’s take on the Olympic kits to know how it’s set up and what ideas it promotes. It’s one more rant assembled by an unaccomplished dingbat who wrongly believes she understands the mindsets of intelligent, motivated, self-confident women because she wrongly believes she is entitled to the same general accolades and recognition that talented, hard-working people usually get.

Several clear mockery-and-dismissal avenues are available for anyone equipped with surface knowledge of either competitive running or “social justice” terminology. For example, not only was Ferrigine not an elite collegian, her college times weren’t even elite high-school times. Last spring, fifteen girls from high-altitude Boulder County, Colorado alone ran under 2:20 for the 800 meters, including nine from a single high school. But if that doesn’t do it for you, the term "complicated discourse" in the headline of any article is a 100-percent-reliable signal that the piece will be dominated by emotionally driven, self-referential blathering—words better suited for the author's twice-week therapy sessions. And finally, Ferrigine burying both the fact that twenty-five uniform options exist and Katie Moon's overly rational pushback deep within the piece torpedoes the entire complaint and with it the need for any similar articles. (Then again, Salon, as implied above, is aimed at soft, microaggression-tabulating generators of opt-in butthurt and associated "safe spaces.")

But even generously omitting these "trivial" issues, the piece is little more than someone who feels inadequate using a theme of "anti-woman" uniforms as an excuse to telegraph her own insecurities—as if the feelings of self-overrating plebes are somehow relevant to world-class athletes—and yet managing at one point during this literary wahhhhmbulance ride to brag about and exaggerate her own objectively unremarkable running accomplishments.

That the first two anti-uniform quotes Ferrigine supplies are from “one Instagram user” and “another Instagram user” is telling. So are her choices for skeptical parties with real names: three black women—a long-jumper who served a doping suspension for weed last year, a Paralympian, and a 35-year-old has-been sprinter-hurdler—and a long-retired, narcissistic, tripe-spouting 5,000-meter runner and alabaster lesbian (or pseudo-lesbian).

Ferrigine gives no evidence that uniforms like these contribute to a higher incidence of eating disorders—she just states it as accepted in-group dogma. Also, the word "problematic" is, like “complicated discourse,” an absolute signifier of a worthless essay, with this one primarily spotlighting not Olympic-level athletes but the author's disturbed ego and feelings. And like a cast of other lifelong neurotics who attended Columbia University and other Ivy League colleges recently, Ferrigine automatically blames her own butthurt feelings on cruel externalities and the inconsiderate goons who maintain anti-woman athletic power structures, predictably ignoring the role of intrinsic psychic factors altogether. 

Ferrigine even admits that she herself not only tolerated “bun-huggers” in her Columbia days but even enjoyed competing in the skimpiest collegiate uniform-bottoms her school offered. Yet at the same time, she suggests that women as a rule are penalized by the "minimal crotch" option. And she claims that the choice of uniforms available to her team wasn't really a choice. While to most readers this is an obviously inane claim, such judgments fail to account for virtually everyone on Ivy League campuses having been rigorously trained from the crib and without their own knowledge to be a wildly overconfident uber-conformist.

I can also answer one of Ferrigine’s plaintive questions:

It says that we’re* seriously thinking that some women are mentally prepared to succeed, whole others, like Gabrielle Ferrigine, are committed to bitching. There is no more depth to this issue than that.

Note also that the piece, like other illegitimate takes on the uniforms. rewards Citius Mag founder and borderline retard Chris Chavez for playing his established role as a pro-Nike shill after being among the first lucky souls to get a preview of the uniforms.

It would be one thing if running’s whiners and grifters were playing their sad trade in an effort to dominate the culture and coverage of a real sport. But foaming at the crotch just to be a recognized voice in this c. 2024 refitted-and-beshitted version of track-and-field? This is a cascade of unapologetic dopers, drawn-looking pro-bulimia trail-clowns, wide-assed fabulists, misogynist feminists, and cackling, pro-perversion disinformation merchants. It’s hard to imagine many true sports fans, or anyone with a standard or moral IQ above a certain level, bothering with track and field—which was emphatically not always the case.

Ivy League campuses should be shut down and their buildings either razed or converted into topless transgender nightclubs. These are nothing but hotbeds of the worst professors, administrators, and students on the planet. It’s become close to impossible to keep an accurate tally of the number of figures who should be delivered uppercuts to the jaw sufficient to launch them backward and upward in grand parabolic arcs reaching heights of fifty or more feet, with these episodes of quick and proportional justice-dispensation admittedly carrying the potential for serious injury.

But everyone needs a sport or sport-like enterprise to rally around, and that includes pro-child-abuse gender-fabulists, rule-breakers across disciplines, conspicuously ignorant and innumerate coaches, a laughably lazy, inept, and unaccountable media, and long-jumpers who can’t stop smoking weed for even the duration of a national championship meet. And in return, this enterprise deserves highly educated and earnest women like Gabriella Ferrigine to help direct its public presentation.