Running from the Facts: "Black women have no agency, even star athletes" edition
This laughingstock of an industry will remain the property of avaricious imbeciles until it finally dies—and today's cultural bonanza-for-bozos, while still peaking, won't last forever
Anyone who regularly tolerates these entries, and agrees with my basic premise that running journalism has a serious and worsening quality-control problem, understands implicitly one of the corollaries of this premise: That if good journalists still exist, almost all of them are clearly too busy with more lucrative or otherwise more compelling endeavors to glide around in the intentionally-made-turbulent 2021 joggersphere. An optimistic skew of this corollary—the version hapless Pollyannas like myself adopt—is that good journalists do in fact exist, but very few would touch distance running anymore even with a Bowerman Track Club-supplied-and-tested, 800-meter-long pole.
Two recent stories have moved me closer to again accepting a harmless but somehow forlorn conclusion I’ve grappled with intermittently since literally the 1930s: Track and field as a whole, and especially the distance-running part, just isn’t important in the greater sports world, and doesn’t have enough true fans amid the influx of screeching meatheads—most of whom are on their way to Boulder if they’re not already here farting up the trails with their compost-and-IPA-rich effluvia—to compel better than D-minus-level work (and honestly, this is being charitable) from some of its most prolific contributors. A typical offering today is knocked flat on its ass by “what the fuck?”-level goofs, the omission and evasion of critical facts, and barely comprehensible prose, often in the same package. Yet today’s typical “reader” either doesn’t know enough about running to notice or doesn’t care as long as the headline alone strikes the right rage-chord in their cable-news-addled minds.
The first of these two stories is a profoundly vapid guest piece in Women’s Running—raw clickbait by a Wokestress with a doctorate in childhood studies who implores readers to treat world-record holders as children if they’re black women, for whom the world is uniquely structured as a diabolical maze of impossible-to-navigate rules. The second is a sidebar in Sports Illustrated’s Olympics preview print issue by unapologetically beaming serial fuckup Chris Chavez that doesn’t just contain errors; its core claim, and whole reason for inclusion in the issue, was itself an error, rendering the predictably scattershot content not merely mistaken, but moot.
The Women’s Running piece is an opinion column authored by Samantha White, who…has a website. Titled “Sha’Carri Richardson and Brianna McNeal Shouldn’t Need to Bare Trauma to Receive Grace,” it argues that the suspensions of those athletes are the result of inherently racist policies. It is a staggeringly oblivious essay; While White surely had no intentions of writing an honest advocacy piece, her cluelessness about professional running and bad overall writing make it perhaps the worst of the doggedly gruesome excretions of performative cultural art that Women’s Running has yet released—worse, even, than Erin Strout’s endless segmented stream of harried horseshit.
Of Richardson, White writes, “With bold determination, she showed us what it meant to take up space and refuse to shrink yourself for others.” Well, Richardson almost ran out of her lane in the semis showboating at the Trials, but otherwise, what the hell does this even mean? I know this is just Wokish drool, but must so much of it be collected and served to the public under the guise of running-related content?
Maybe the biggest howler is White pointing to the tests Brianna McNeal didn’t miss in 2016 as a reason to not worry about her streak of misses the following year. Maybe it’s one of the other stupid things in this essay. It doesn’t matter, because while the piece is uniformly terrible, it’ll help keep the online pair of skidmarked granny-panties that published it afloat for a spell. They could at least change the thing’s name; Women’s Running offers nothing I can see to real women runners of any age. Even in a publishing environment where keywords have all the weight that content has lost, this essay should embarrass anyone who played a role in its genesis and promotion. But that won’t happen, because these merry assholes are soullessly riding the wave.
The idea that rules created by white people are invalid really is hammered squarely into Wokism, and I find it hard to process because it debases people of color. Last summer, the National Museum of African American History and Culture came up with this graphic, which asserts that things like science, hard work, the nuclear family, and even being on time are part of “white culture.”
This, even to me at a zoomed-out, “look at what people do” level, is not funny. It looks like part of a manifesto by some Klansman in the Florida panhandle, not the work of progressive black scholars.
I don’t think I have to be black to say that, if I made an error in conduct and had news stories written about me as a result, I’d prefer to be seen as someone who consciously decided to make the choices I did than as a hapless bumbler who managed to set a world record in a track event, but just can’t show up where I’m supposed to be at the right times because clocks are external to the culture of my race and therefore confusing. I would not be relieved or encouraged to be portrayed as someone who doesn’t get it because the racists keep changing the locks by one number and the passwords by one letter as they stand watching me and chortling behind a one-way mirror.
That white and black writers alike are engaging this kind of patronization tells you how deeply they’re really thought about any of this, and what their goals for broader society are (hint: There are none, this is a gang of individual self-promoters pretending to cohere around a noble cause).
So it’s not surprising, just sad, that a striking commonality among Woke running writers that goes unnoticed amid levels of journalistic incompetence bordering on catatonia is how bad their slavering advocacy unintentionally makes their subjects look—akin to what happens when companies promote conspicuously antisocial influencers under the guise of social justice. No one at HOKA ONE ONE or anywhere else cares will happen to clowns like Latoya Shauntay Snell—now at least 250 pounds of shit packed into a 50-pound bag and bound for this October’s Boston Marathon, a story that’ll have to wait a bit—once Wokism runs its course.
Meanwhile, Chris Chavez’s latest known mistake—and he really just can’t stop fucking up and not apologizing for it, because he’s that kind of rat-bastard—is especially grim considering he considers himself a cog in the social-progress machine, as his miscue slights two black athletes. In a sidebar profile Aliphine Tuliamuk—who has an obscene-sounding 31 siblings—he somehow managed to forget about 2004 U.S. Olympian Colleen de Reuck (who isn’t African in the, you know, “African” sense of the piece, but is still a native of South Africa), 2004 U.S. Olympian Meb Keflezighi (who took the silver medal in the marathon in Athens) and five-time U.S. Olympian Abdi Abdirahman, who at 44 is entered in this very Olympic Marathon.
I added a post to a Letsrun thread about this, knowing that posting under my own name there results mainly in a few anonymous trolls rising up dicklesslessly and with desiccated vaginas to get in a few understandable, if off-the-mark, licks. Notice that although I didn’t even link to any of my articles or identify myself as a writer at all, the few who responded to my post had no defense of Chavez’ boo-boos, and didn’t even pretend to keep the focus on them. One commenter even suggested I envied his “success,” an odd observation to make considering how little I plainly think of the fellow.
Remember, Chavez was already completely unreliable well before this screw-up. In just the past year, he, a distracted and substandard track announcer, has taken aim at an announcer to curry favor with the approximately 17 billion women runners powered by body insecurity; played a big role in keeping a non-incident of racism aimed at canceling a charitable race director alive; and was a major spreader of fake news when Shelby Houlihan’s ban became public. And like the other chronic doofuses I write about here, he is completely unaccountable.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who’s okay with any of this is rooting for the entire top-to-bottom enterprise of running to fail a lot harder than I ever could, and I have my moments.
None of this is rooted in professional envy. Maybe this isn’t evident, but the fact that I wrote for running magazines for a long time and have a couple of books on the subject to my credit doesn’t imply that I ever sought to make any kind of career within the sport. In 2000, I was offered a high editorial position at a running magazine after being considered for the position without my knowledge, and turned it down partly because I was tied to my coaching duties in New Hampshire and partly because even I wasn’t foolish enough to move to southwestern Connecticut for the money being offered. A few years later, I had a chance to amass a wealth of online coaching clients when I was running Pete Pfitzinger’s site and repeatedly resisted because I wasn’t interested in online coaching at a grand scale; it would have been easy back then to rack up a couple of dozen clients and roll forward with that for any number of years. And in addition to not having any pertinent aspirations, I was too drunk and disorganized too much of the time, and already too disenchanted with life, to embark on any kind of fixed “career.” In no given year have I made more than maybe a quarter of my income from running. It’s obviously something I love and have come to structure my life around, but at a careful and sometimes grudging distance.
So why do I care? Peeling away every layer to leave only the darkly glowing kernel self-interest within, I can run and time myself over various distances, enjoy trotting with my dog, and otherwise keep up my own habit without any knowledge at all of what the fools are fooling around with. Adding layers, I can follow the high-school, professional, and (while it lasts) college scenes without worrying about “running spaces” discussed at great length by people who can barely move in straight lines for long enough to finish a 5K. And so on.
I also can’t help but notice that I have no kids, and don’t run road races anymore, and therefore in theory have no special reason to be concerned about whatever degradation running is undergoing. All of that, like practically everything else, is more of a problem for people who are now in their teens and their parents than it is for those of us mostly marking time until we have no more of it. Wouldn’t it be easier to just shut up or at least snicker a little more quietly? Because some of this is amusing, isn’t it?
Not really. The main reason I first became pissed at these idiots is their unnecessarily taking aim at figures within running. Chavez was perhaps the guiltiest of them all, even using Outside’s hit piece as fodder for a podcast hosted by some gravelly voiced dingbat-from-hell. Which brings up another point: Although I myself couldn’t care less about running’s nonexistent official pecking order, Chavez, with his one open and myopic eye trained solely on achieving higher status, certainly seems jealous of the status Laz enjoys: “It can be difficult to talk negatively about people who have large followings, lots of power, and have created events that are, frankly, important to the running community.”
Well, Laz has earned all of that, you putz. You are a creepy little sort who has not.
And come to think of it, I care because at age 17, when I was a big fan of SI and its two-time cover athlete Paulina Porizkova, I and my runner friends would have called the author of an article like this something along the lines of a “goddamned retard,” and you’ll have to forgive me for time-machining that classic in from 1987 while it’s still allowed to refer to a person as deficient in physical, academic, or mental conduct at all. This was recently released by Brandeis University as part of an Onion-esque effort at speech control on campus:
How nuts is this? Even religious whackos aren’t this censorious, and you don’t have to pay $50,000 a year to attend even the dumbest church in America.
Here’s the coup de grace in this topic, though. Apparently, Chavez, with the help of other intrepid reporters like Strout, is teaching people how to be a journalist, which is like an impotent man traveling the country with the body of his recently deceased daughter offering demonstrations on proper sexual-intercourse technique.
More about this dubious program is here. “Each of the men and women that comprise the inaugural Magic Boost class are already active in the track & field storytelling space,” Chavez boasts, not knowing what “comprise” means, when to use “is” instead of “are,” or the difference between “that” and who.” No wonder most of these poor people are squinting.
One thing that fails to stick in my mind amid the thoroughgoing demolition of journalistic standards is the colossal number of everyday citizens, most of them American college graduates, who would rather be known for something, even if only within a small social domain or institution, than remain anonymous altogether. Even when it means consciously discarding whatever ethical shackles once constrained them to being “bad but fair” rather than “bad and dishonest,” a startling number of the unwashed are perfectly okay these days achieving a given level of renown within the tiny world of running even when they know that their efforts lie objectively between a bad joke and a toxic-smoke-belching industrial ruin, even on the rare occasions they try to rise to some minimal journalistic or creative standard. People with journalism degrees don’t wind up in the running world unless they’re unusually blunt-minded, and we* can’t stop seeing more and more evidence.
None of the..the darned lunkheads I write about here would change a thing even if they had the skills to do half-decent work, which they don’t. They like their slants, their sloppiness, and their stubborn refusal to acknowledge any of their mistakes or even their own transparent bias. Unprincipled greed-heads and suck-ups who view life as a basic competition to marshal material resources and renown—often disguising themselves as advocates for whatever’s convenient—exist in every niche. Now more than ever, it’s easy to equate your own standing with a job well done if you refer only to your subscriber or follower numbers and somehow ignore all the nettlesome but valid criticisms people are making of you and your work. On this view, as long as your critics don’t gain much notice, none of what they say is actually even real.
Right now, as it happens, an online militia of disgruntled white women armed with media bullhorns is channeling a combination of personal resentment and sham support for America’s economic underclass into creating enough sheer noise to compensate for knowing nothing of substance about the sport, because this is the kind of crap non-serious runners with most of their attention on CNN and MSNBC want to hear. Chavez is not among the conductors of this train, but he has made sure to repeatedly get tickets to ride along for as many stops as it takes to fuck up, smile, and skitter off toward his next mistake. Making sure to kiss one pro runner’s ass after another, even when this is more uncalled for than usual, gives all of these cowards another layer of de facto job security.
Today’s media class doesn’t want to tell anything accurately if that route threatens their relationships with the people they cover; they just want to say whatever ensures they’ll be the ones telling running stories next week. These are people who might as well wake up, look in the mirror every morning, and growl, “I take a steamy dump on my own job, on purpose, every day and have done so for as long as I can remember” before sitting down at their keyboards to generate another burst of indignant, cuntic blather, not one element of which they could sensibly defend in a moderated debate. (I get that I’m something of an indignant cunt myself, but I don’t run and hide.)
These people and their supporters suck; at some level, each of them knows this. But they can probably coast along for as long as Wokism remains a driving media and cultural force. And when it’s all over, none of these twats will feel compelled to answer for any of their mistakes, because they have all been erring as a disturbingly efficient unit, the one thing they’re able to do well. So each of them individually will have an excuse when history shines unkindly on their efforts of today: “Well, we all thought that then.”
But it won’t matter, because no one in this batch is capable of doing anything well anyway. They shouldn’t be in media jobs, but then again neither should anyone, because not enough living people genuinely care to receive factual information anymore. We may as well all be high, all the time, like I plan to be soon. And that’s really all I have in closing.