No shoe company, media outlet, or pro runner would be dumb enough to support a belligerent scammer like Latoya Shauntay Snell
No shoe company, media outlet, or pro runner would be dumb enough to support a belligerent scammer like Latoya Shauntay Snell
Welcome to the era of woke-washing, both personal and corporate
36-year-old Latoya Shauntay Snell of Brooklyn has been assigned bib number 19437 for the 2021 Boston Marathon. She’s also the owner of a personal-best time of 6 hours, 33 minutes, and 35 seconds, which she ran in her second of twelve official lifetime finishes (per MarathonGuide.com). Her most recent official 26.2M result: 8:02:21, placing her 53,353rd out of 53,520 finishers.
The final qualifying time for the 2021 Boston Marathon for 35-to-39-year-old women was 3:27:13. Over nine thousand runners who met the provisional qualifying standard for their age group (for Snell, this was 3:35:00) were denied a bib, with the Boston Athletic Association citing space limitations.
Snell, whose Strava profile as of this posting shows her having run a total of 18.3 miles this year despite possessing the energy to caper around online all day, wound up with a Boston bib in late July thanks to someone at Amazon being either gullible or a cruel prankster. She also has a deal with HOKA, which doesn’t even make puffy shoes specifically for lazy people to wear while getting drunk and spinning yarns about themselves, and which terminated its support of the elite New Jersey-New York Track Club last year.
I wonder what was going through the head of Mike McManus, HOKA’s global marketing director, when he decided to sign Snell to whatever deal she has. Even if his mush-minded underlings are responsible for this debacle, he has to know about it and he doesn’t strike me as the sort to be enthused about such an endeavor. (Nothing in this post, by the way, is aimed at any of HOKA’s competitive enterprises or shoes.)
Snell is—first, last, and foremost—a sociopathic Internet loudmouth with an ever-expanding presence and list of excuses for why, post-COVID-19 cancellations and delays, she’s posing as an endurance athlete instead of trying to be even a lazy one. Having heroically fought her way over 280 pounds this summer, she’s in no condition these days to finish a marathon under her own power in anything close to eight hours, a phrase I can hardly believe I just typed about any able-bodied 36-year-old human being, much less a person being showered with freebies and adulation.
Her lies—mostly exaggerations or fabrications about her activity level, physical infirmities, and harassment by others—explode like shit-geysers from her unwiped and constantly winking face-anus so often, so forcefully, and in so many different cartoonish directions that it’s hard to pick an entry point with a theme that captures even half of how morbid and gross this woman’s conduct is, and how willing she is to smear and spit at anyone and anything to make a buck—when she’s nervy enough to even face some the pushback she gets, anyway. She is a no-account, run-of-the-mill grifter feigning bravery and defiance, which if nothing else is congruent with dressing up in workout gear and pretending to be an athlete. She’s the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Influencer, and the camera-flashing, trash-talking beast within is never sated.
Snell’s false claims of having completed over 200 races and 24 marathons have been echoed by various podcasters and outlets either too lazy to do a few minutes of research, too sloppy about their work to care, or too intent on pushing “social justice” at all costs to bother with annoyances like facts. If I wanted to waste even more time today, I could unspool examples. But know that virtually everyone in the running media or meta-media who has chimed in on the Latoya phenomenon, especially the man-haters or people running their own scams, thinks she’s a terrific addition to the scene. (In their hearts, they really don’t. But most pro runners with public profiles, especially recently retired ones, are as insincere and whiny as Snell herself is most of the time.)
Despite what Snell wants people to believe, her detractors don’t care about her weight, skin color, gender or any other easily labeled aspect of her identity. She uses her melanin deposits, her ovaries, and her bloat to preclude or deflect accusations of moral degeneracy. But this tactic only works if you accept Snell’s implied premise that being fat, black or female makes someone inherently more likely to be either weak and in need of handholding, or a scumbag who needs to be tolerated as part of acknowledging that white people suck. I reject both forks of this premise.
Snell’s organizing her Facebook trolls to revolt against Derek Murphy—referring to the “Quaker Oats ass” of a Murphy supporter with, like, no racialist overtones at all—in an effort to conceal his findings, which he hadn’t even published on MarathonInvestigation.com, shows both her keen understanding of how the diseased influencer game is played and the absence of self-imposed limits on her dirtbag conduct. When Snell grew weary of her tall tales being questioned by Aysha Mirza, a model whose abhorrence of unfounded running claims is as potent as Snell’s drive to manufacture them, she attempted to portray what was nothing more than an ongoing scuffle between influencers as harassment, crying victim and demanding cash from the Internet to fund a legal battle she never intended to fight and had no standing to initiate anyway.
Murphy later ascertained that Snell has raised over $5,000 as of last August. That figure now stands at over $15,000, and there has been no lawsuit in the year-plus since. There never will be. Snell is just a flat-out scam-machine—no artistry about it, just her face and her fingers flapping constantly about all the grief she takes for merely trying to profit from being a horrible person in as many ways as possible.
Snell’s relationship with Runner’s World was short-lived; apparently, the combination of RW’s unwillingness to pay her what she thinks she’s worth and their refusal to delete Facebook posts linking to Murphy’s work and exposing Snell’s lies was too oppressive for a businesswoman and multisport athlete to bear. But she has mostly gotten her way, as her few vocal critics have fallen mostly silent. We* live in an era of “Bullshit and money both talk,” at least in the Wokism-soaked world of citizen jogging.
Snell does people masochistic enough to listen to her drivel a real disservice along multiple fronts. In January 2020, she claimed on a podcast that she was in recovery from alcohol abuse. She even later implored her followers to be sensitive toward ploy-struggling people such as herself.
But a few months ago, she had an, uh, slip. Maybe she didn’t know there was alcohol being serves on the premises.
This isn’t someone trying to sober up and then being unwilling to admit to a “relapse.” This is just a gluttonous party animal who prefers Instagram to other media because Instagram stories disappear after 24 hours, often with no trace. So, shame on her for potentially triggering people who actually want to quit drinking and stay quit, not that anyone interested in sound mental health would pay any attention to this goon in the first place, myself included.
Ever since Snell was gifted a bib for Boston—and keep in mind that some 9,215 runners who ran weed-out-level (necessary, but not sufficient) qualifying times were turned away from the race—Snell, who labels her critics “fatphobes” (including the surgeons she has consulted) while calling herself “the Running Fat Chef” and is at most two-thirds correct, has been planning her Boston escape route, trying to figure out how she can retain her standing as an imaginary badass while dodging the horrors of actual training and racing.
None of this is really a surprise to anyone. She’s achieved her support and sponsorships despite her deviant behavior being no secret. Those familiar with Snell, in fact, fall overwhelmingly into two groups: Those who know she’s lying her ass off and don’t like it, and those who know she’s lying her ass off and think it’s great. The world being what it is, I suppose a nontrivial number of blinkered followers take her at her word, but to most, her every triumphantly dishonest cackle or bleat is just a well-timed swing in a wholly righteous fight against those who would Keep Her Down.
This fever-dream-and-victimhood-stuffed pinata dangling low above New York City has been lying about everything of consequence for years, with her fibs as brazen and artless as those of a four-year-old and her temperament scaled to the same preschool level. When caught and exposed, Snell engages in bombastic social-media filibustering in an attempt to conceal both her long list of deceptions and the fact that for all her noise, she’s just a jabbering jellyfish, a snowflake operating at 130 decibels through a one-way Instagram bullhorn. She has gained every inch of her strained platform through a combination of her own pathological narcissism and the comically self-serving and thoughtless rush by white society to both process and monetize its own supposed guilt post-George Floyd.
Snell is a ghastly human being, but smart when it comes to making the most of who and what she is and cannot escape being. Whereas some people unhappy with their bodies post pictures of those bodies only reluctantly, and cringe at the idea of random meanies dropping in to leave unkind comments, Snell intentionally posts imagery that would be revolting no matter the source, then scans her comment threads looking for stuff to pounce on as an “abuse victim.” She trolls for additional pity by claiming to have “lost followers” for unstated reasons. She’s truly pathetic, as is anyone who stands with her or anyone on these tactics.
I don’t care about Snell’s unlikely combination of uterine and other problems, which she says may keep her off the line at Boston; I’m also not denying that she, like many who struggle with their weight, is burdened by genuine health issues. In Snell, I don’t primarily see fatness or blackness or sickness or anything besides a human being acting like a freewheeling bratty child whose conscience has not yet been joined at its seams. If she tries to sue me, which she won’t, I’ll respond by offering to go on a podcast with her, where we can take turns asking each other ten questions about specific claims made by the person on the answering side. This will of course never happen either, because Snell is a coward. She is a prop, no one’s hero, just a mannerless bozo who will keep flying for free on Wokish Airlines (owned and operated entirely by self-serving white shitlibs) before the fuel finally runs out.
But Snell’s degeneracy and offenses are not the complete or even central story here, despite them accounting for most of my words today (see? Influencing works!). All of my “How could they?” innuendo above is completely for show. We all know why Snell has become a niche cause célèbre. It’s not in spite of her angry, toxic, empty filibustering and “can’t-do, me too sick” vibe; it’s precisely because of these self-imposed and imaginary limitations and everything she says is responsible for them.
Snell could not exist in her present form no matter now energetic her self-promoting efforts if she didn’t have two interrelated things on her side, both of them attributable to blind luck. One is the comical paralysis white liberal Americans experience when someone claiming membership in an oppressed demographic does something obviously punishment-worthy, and the other is the rush by people and companies alike to pretend to solve social problems by handing cash and praise to psychotically greedy and self-interested representatives of those demographics.
Because Snell claims to suffer from every “-ism” known and is loud about these claims, she’s the perfect substrate for a company looking for a one-stop shop for all their c. 2021 “social conscience” needs.
Fat? CHECK!
Black? CHECK!
Queer? Doubtful, but she says she is, in between reminding her audience that her husband and teenage son follow her accounts. CHECK!
Endometriosis, plus a host of related conditions? The airy way she suggests suffering from an implausible array of gynecological disorders suggests she’s never had any of them. But either way, it’s not about truth, it’s about noise, so CHECK!
And on and on it goes, with an additional irony being Snell happily accepting these diagnoses from doctors she says she doesn’t trust because they’re fatphobes. Other than how she privately views her dilapidated character, there is absolutely no shame at all in the mind and body of this one—zero.
As a result, any company that needs to show it’s playing along can throw Snell a bunch of edible high-potassium granny-panties and say “See? We help every kind of marginalized person out there.”
How the LieToya show is supposed to materially help genuinely struggling people is unclear. Is any of this really inspiring more people to buy HOKAs? Is it really a step toward getting more fat people without much in the way of means or decent places to run into the running community, given that people like Snell constantly wail about how unfriendly the running environment is to people of color, et cetera?
However this all ends and whoever benefits besides the liar in the middle of the maelstrom, I know no people of color, fat people, women, back-of-the-packers, or anyone at all who would like to be recognized as a member of any clubs Snell claims to be in. Running is a weird habit; people who are objectively not gifted at it still love marathons, and it’s not because they enjoy fighting themselves, it’s because people who may look like they are barely moving can still love the hell out of running. It may not be fun slogging through a six-hour marathon, but it’s not the desire to smash a hammer over their heads that gets them out there. When these anonymously toiling runners—lawyers, students, bums, whoever—see someone like Snell in the limelight, knowing she hasn’t done the work she says she has, it must chafe. Again, be as slow as you want (maybe not the best way to phrase it) but match your claims to your data. That’s all anyone who respects running asks of other runners.
Clearly, Latoya Shauntay Snell owes one hundred percent of her modest notoriety to a mostly white fitness industry now reeling from Stage IV Wokism, and she owes a great deal of her ability to deflect criticism to the kind of bullying that would never work in a world not giving assholes with the right combination of skin color and gender (or gender confusion) an absolute moral and ethical pass. And it doesn’t work against independent writers who couldn’t care less what kind of smokescreen she tries to create when challenged or what sort of belligerent responses she suborns from her idiot hordes.
In distance running, liars and posers have historically been boisterously mocked to the sidelines. As in any walk of life, issuing a series of easily falsified claims about your achievements, then hiding from or viciously gaslighting your critics, has historically proven a dubious career strategy. But in today’s morally inverted world, not only can you be punished for not doing anything if you’re older, white and male, Snell’s impressively broad-ranging combination of obnoxious character flaws can be monetized if you happen to be fat, black, female, and unburdened by proper feelings of shame over shameful behavior.
But while this shambling, macabre, and altogether cowardly scam-machine—who was born with an extra mouth where her “OFF” button should be—certainly deserves to be ridiculed to the sidelines, the real problem is the companies that are supporting her in the first place. One silver lining, if that label even applies, is that the whole sad show is a powerful lesson in just how little the companies involved actually care about equality of opportunity or anything of broad social value. In the same way hotel chains pretend to care about the environment as an excuse to lower water pressure and supply less clean linen—”greenwashing”—corporations and other organizations eager to appear in tune with social justice can take token steps in this area by lavishing attention on a single target. I doubt anyone who stops to think about this believes such efforts to be legitimate, any more than Snell herself expects people to believe everything she says.
Although this “woke-washing” is fitting—Snell is a poly-glutton who also cares only about what she can take for herself, be this at the expense of Whitey or fellow people of color—it’s not what these companies hope to reveal about themselves. Or maybe it is.
Since Snell loves putting her life out there, I’ll bite and speculate that she doesn’t start the race, but makes the trip to Boston for the photo ops and free swag. If she doesn’t start, she’ll have a 5,000-word nonsense story, none of which will explain why, if she’s practically on her death bed, she accepted the Boston bib in the first place. Gee, some mystery. And if she starts, she won’t make it to Framingham, probably a good thing for her since that’s where spectators are most likely to gather around her fallen self and blow cigarette smoke in her face as they heckle away. And if that happens, or if she really does encounter a physical problem, will anyone from HOKA or Amazon step up and admit they shouldn’t have pushed so ill an “athlete” into a long race—especially since so many other people of size, color, and so on are far more deserving of “influencer” bibs?
As I composed this, one of my overriding thoughts was how happy I am, really, to be considered unfit for this industry and to have become the subject of formal, successful ousting efforts. I cannot express how roundly superior I feel to anyone convinced that any of this is okay. The decay of citizen running into a sea of pathologically insecure whiners and Internet snipers may not be high on the list of civilization’s gravest challenges, but what a fucking joke.