Pushback against running's sleaze-distributors gained a blip of momentum last week
The sport's anti-integrity voices all bear the warble of keen self-interest, even if this is sometimes obscured by the noise of artless deflection
Over the past week, two runners—one an unassuming YouTuber and dad, the other a columnist for The New York Times and book author—took active stances on behalf of integrity. Taking necessarily different approaches, each observer noted failures in administrative or boardroom oversight that have, in different ways, made running a more comfortable niche for cheaters and social arsonists.
Because it’s now taboo for white men to even indirectly suggest that some women of color, being human, might suffer from the same ethical impurities as other entrepreneurial figures and everyday people, both of these critics received an obligatory burst of blowback. But most of the sparks flew from a small but noisy group of consistently, almost boringly wrongheaded accusers who don’t care about fairness and instead want the entire world structured in accordance with their personal revenge fantasies, and in fact love to see cheating when the right dirtbags are getting away with it.
I wrote last week about the dismissive responses by representatives of the demoralized websites Fast Women and Citius Mag to Matthew Futterman’s column about U.S.-based Kenyan Susan Lokedi recently winning the New York City Marathon after not being drug-tested since June of last year. I noted that whether Alison Wade and Kyle Merber like it or not, this is a significant story and would be even if Kenya were not now enjoying a nominal turn as the world’s most visibly PED-beleaguered nation.
And from my perspective, any story that tackles uncomfortable facts—especially when it appears in an otherwise useless outlet like The New York Times—is absolutely worth defending from the anti-integrity mob, a tapeworm-infested club to which most contemporary running-pundits are determined to forever belong.
Some heroine tried to set Wade straight in the “private” Fast Women group on Facebook after Wade declared war on Futterman for the crime of suggesting the New York City Marathon may not have covered itself perfectly in advance of the 2022 race. From her yammering and yapping, you’d think that Futterman’s column by itself bears the power to issue a suspension to Lokedi or materially tarnish or even erase her win.
Wade fixates on Lokedi being better than everyone realized, which means nothing. Her invoking Lokedi’s choice of footwear is a transparently desperate salvo. And because you may have trouble making out the text in the image above, Wade writes “He [Futterman] makes her win sound like more of a long shot than it was”—once again not even close to the point of Futterman’s story.
Muna Mitchell, whoever she is, was sanguine enough to know exactly what she was up against here. She could see that Wade’s line in her post, “There’s a chance everyone in the field is doping,” was utter lip service, and that “I think anti-doping efforts are important” was obviously a lie, since anyone sincerely hoping for a cleaner sport wouldn’t be making a fuss over this article or hungering for the return of Shelby Houlihan to competition.
Wade has it in for Futterman anyway, in part because she was evidently upset that this article after the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials didn’t sufficiently emphasize the immigrant-American angle, a hard conclusion to draw given the lavish treatment of just this topic. Wade simply doesn’t want men involved in women’s sports at all except as occasional competitors; she certainly doesn’t want them making accurate but inconvenient remarks.
The worst aspect of Wade’s “Don’t you dare say this” is that Wade is among those who tried to get mega-philanthropic ultramarathon race director Gary Cantrell cancelled—and she even used the word “boycotting”—for a completely imaginary instance of not being socially conscious enough. Wade was part of a sweeping running-media smear campaign that remains inexcusable and for which no one involved has apologized. (It’s also easy for someone who shows no evidence of doing any running at all herself to suggest boycotting events at which others eagerly get off their asses and move around.)
Wade, who needs either a larger or a higher-wattage vibrator, is a relentless troublemaker whose vision of the sport is a bunch of eunuch-like brownish females all running the NCAA Championships in sweatpants, some with frizzy sideburns, all with coaches using she/her pronouns, holding hands throughout and sharing first place at eight-minute pace. No (admitted) men, no hurt feelings, no skin visible to others below the neck, no problems!
And beyond Wade’s own hatchet-jobs, she likes to sing the praises of other gutless and unethical operators who share her vision of destroying an institution that others have worked hard to create and maintain.
(Don’t you love how people like Alison Wade with no tolerance for emotional discomfort whatsoever—none, zero, nil—take it upon themselves to order others to experience this kind of discomfort? There is something amiss with this woman’s mind as well as her spirit.)
Martinus Evans is a set of MINI Cooper-sized man-boobs who conspired with his wife to steal over $50,000 from the University of Connecticut a few years ago, and Snell needs no introduction here. She’s someone who completed 13 or 14 marathons at a somewhat-running pace between 2015 and 2019, but who claims to have done twice as many or more. She can no longer physically run thanks to intentionally gaining around 150 pounds. Yet despite this proud, years-long anti-fitness bender, her lying, her refusal to answer for that lying, and a ceaselessly vulgar and hostile (but fundamentally yellow) persona, Snell has been the recipient of freebies and support from HOKA, the New York Road Runners, and other entities since becoming a full-time Internet goon in 2019. She doesn’t train at all, yet the heads of Strava have awarded her “verified athlete” status.
Snell was given an entry into this year’s New York City Marathon despite not qualifying and being nothing but a bellowing case of online gonorrhea since the moment she gained her 100th Instagram follower. There is nothing good about her; it’s not as if there are deeper reasons to ignore Snell’s adversarial surface traits, because beneath them lies nothing but more of the same meanness and fakery, only more cloying and rottener the closer one approaches the center of her hateful guts.
Yes, Snell is a hatemonger, and in adopting her as a mascot over hundreds if not thousands of more deserving women of size, HOKA and the NYRR have affirmed that they need to revamp their managerial structures and purge whatever vandals are responsible for Snell’s ascendancy. They won’t, because there are some morally confused people in those organizations, among them classic dodgers who, like Snell, don’t respond to messages questioning their choices.
At this stage, no one who comments on Snell’s posts can plead ignorance of her fraudulence, so if you see any “big” names in on her Instagram profile, you can conclude with high confidence that those people are hiding something and drawing private, half-bitter succor from the flagrancy of Snell’s antics.
After Snell failed to finish the marathon—she technically walked the route, but not even the NYRR lets people officially finish when moseying along at slower than 19:00 pace—the Instagram account of Strava celebrated Snell being too overfed, overboozed, and plain lazy and weak to hack it and failing miserably and hilariously as a result, though Strava chose alternate phrasing.
Snell has averaged less than a mile a day on foot in 2022, and since this information is on her Strava account, whoever wrote this post—someone who in real life would never, ever be able to coherently defend his or her words and who actually deserves to be publicly humiliated, but who will never come forward to claim responsibility—has access to the information.
The owner of the account below, a fellow named Nate, decided to diplomatically apprise Strava of the illegitimacy of its choice. I can’t see his comment, so perhaps it’s gone, but I’m sure it was less caustic than what I would have written (and did this moment write).
Afterward, Snell apparently went ballistic in response, even making a half-hour-long live video about the horror of being properly called out for being physically inert and a bully. Of course, that video was performance art for Snell’s demoralized fans only, and is gone now, having served its transient purpose.
Below is Nate’s video response to Snell’s tirade and the situation as he sees it generally.
I can assure Nate that no lasting harm will come to him because of this. I’ve been chronicling Snell and her clown-show for two years, and no one says fuck-all; they just sulk and stamp their pudgy feet and smolder in the hope that I grow bored with them, which I won’t. Occasionally, some ‘fraidy-cat will wash up in the comments with a long soliloquy about how white people suck overall, but never anyone with a name.
These people know Snell is a scammer. The problem is the number of them who get off on such disruptive and malign presences owing to, it would seem, recondite grudges or garden-variety boredom compounded by too many unstudied and unrewarding glances in the mirror.
The saddest thing to me—and Snell is wise enough to understand this acutely—is that the companies sponsoring Snell are fully aware that they are promoting a terrible person, one who embodies virtually every negative stereotype that has dogged American blacks since the Ronald Reagan “welfare queen” era and before—shiftless, loud, inarticulate, dishonest, blaming the system for everything while chortling at her own essential, gleeful malevolence and her capacity to apply a personal layer of sham-varnish to everything her odious bulk contacts. And along with Snell, we* have grifters like Alison Desir banging the race-gong for the similar sole purpose of making some cash and a name for herself'; Desir, despite having the brains of a kumquat and nothing workable or positive to say, is categorically adored by everyone in this wreck of a professional sport, too.
Given that other executives are making similarly terrible marketing choices across various industries, I’ve started wondering if corporate America and the media aren’t conspiring to ultimately derogate the standing of people of color in the United States. The idea is, elevate a few energetic sleazebags from the minority ranks through Wokism, only to later show that the elevation was only for the purpose of a more forceful body-slam later. It’s already happened to Kanye West and Kyrie Irving; you can say what you want about the ghastliness of their outbursts, but as recently as 2020 we* were encouraging black people to unconditionally speak truth to power no matter what. As it happens, that all depends on who’s in power and intent to prove even to extraordinary rich black people that in the end they need to know their place, which when it comes down to what matters hasn’t budged in fifty years.
If that sounds too cynical, then explain what any of these entities, or any U.S. government agencies, are broadly doing to help people of color lead better lives in America right now. One goddamn single real thing. That bag’s empty again, ain’t it? And if that’s the case, how long the billionaires’ charade of giving a hoot about people of color ad hoc queer-flags is entirely dependent on how long it takes for the billionaires to decide it’s time for a new far-flung societal distraction, like another covid variant or a new pandemic altogether.
I don’t particularly care if Alison Wade and Latoya Shauntay Snell are still kicking around demonically in five years, expelling the same high-sulfur Internet farts and continuing to bask in the perverse miasma. But I give the angry white bitch a far better chance of maintaining material online support over the long haul than the angry black bitch, because that’s how it was all supposed to work out to begin with. The very existence of Robin DiAngelo, let alone her becoming a zillionaire, testifies to the fact that Wokism is nothing more than another way for well-off white people to feign concern for people they move to the suburbs to avoid in real life, all while making status and sometimes material gains in the bargain. It’s good work if you can get it.
And that in turn is why so much of Wokism looks so fraudulent: Because 100 percent of it is.
Govern yourselves accordingly, friends and dingbats. And just for fun, here is a rolling sample of the most recent tweets including the phrase “white men.” You can see that these amass at an alarming rate, with few of them complimentary in orientation or tone. I dare one of you to try the phrase “black people” or “the Jews” and see how long your Twitter account remains usable. You could also roll out jazzy combinations like “Ukrainian Nazi heroes” just to scuttle whatever wankers remain at the Musky helm of that accursed enterprise.