Running from the Facts: "Showing our true colors" edition
If Satan invented this confederacy of dunces, God's response has been to orchestrate scenarios perfectly designed to embarrass them and expose their moral hypocrisy
The recent disclosure that U.S. distance-running megastar Shelby Houlihan is already more than ten percent of the way through serving a four-year doping ban has already fallen several bad-news cycles into track and field’s past. In the last week alone, three unflattering stories about U.S. women athletes—two with direct bearing on their subjects’ careers—have emerged or taken inglorious new turns. In that span, the same loose group of pundits I’ve been monotonously describing as unreliable frauds for months proved just as adroit at mishandling each of these events as they had at botching the Houlihan story—even more so, in fact, since they can’t blame porous but well-coordinated Nike propaganda for their latest round of failures.
Last Friday, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced that sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson, fresh off a resounding win in the 100-meter dash at the U.S. Olympic Trials, had tested positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, at that meet. This negated her results at the Trials and knocked her out of her signature event at the Olympics, though she may still get to compete as a member of the 4 × 100-meter relay. That I and many others believe that nontrivial levels of psychoactive cannabinoids should be introduced into the entire U.S. public water supply, starting with the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts, is immaterial to this episode and others like it.
In addition, implement-thrower Gwen Berry, the winner of the hammer throw at the Olympic Trials and no stranger to controversy already, attracted attention by turning away from the U.S. flag during the Trials awards ceremony.
While I have no especially strong inherent feelings about this kind of protest-act, it’s unquestionably an ultra-low-percentage shot no matter the ultimate aim; this is because anytime a public figure “disrespects the flag,” the first and most energetic response is the right-wing media dredging up anything damaging about the flag-snubber they can. Even when such a search produces nothing that can be weaponized, it’s questionable whether many Americans think that these kinds of displays are a good idea, even people convinced the U.S. is the worldwide epicenter of racial and other forms of disharmony.
But in this case, the search turned up a lot of ugly, polyracist, “ableist” tweets. Though the tweets were a decade old in some cases, Berry, no genius at forensic countermeasures, didn’t start deleting them until they had already been screen-captured and published by Fox News and a wealth of other outlets.
Berry has as of this writing not apologized, suggesting instead that the tweets are too old to mean anything, and emphasizing that she has the judgment of a turnip generally.
Again, as with turning a podium into a means to express distaste for people who share your nationality, let’s say I have no visceral response of my own to the openly bigoted statements of an American track and field Olympian. If it’s necessary to ruthlessly batter a charitable a race director for racist behavior—on the basis of a single showboating liar’s testimony, and even when everyone involved admits during the smearing itself that no racism is evident—shouldn’t the same people responsible for that railroading be even more ruthless with Berry? Or are only false racist narratives interesting to running’s version of journalists? And, if that’s not enough, are progressive (or any) women now suddenly okay with Berry sympathizing with Brett Kavanaugh and trivializing the experiences of rape victims?
No. So far, no track-and-field pundits are being critical of Berry’s outbursts and blithe absence of remorse. Especially given their own history of mudslinging, the real motivation behind their social-justice yammering should be clear by now even to the densest skeptic: They just want to see certain groups of people diminished and watch themselves get social-media likes for their insincere support of equality efforts and baseless complaining.
In no scenario could this be attractive, but as I’ve mentioned many times, importing psychological baggage into a journalism job or similar venture blows the job or venture apart just quickly as it does in the case of a judge, medical researcher, or any other ostensibly independent arbiter. The fact that people have been allowed to do this with impunity for several years doesn’t change anything about how shady they are or infuse their output with veracity; look how long Rush Limbaugh was on the radio.
Finally, the five-year suspension of American 100-meter hurdler and defending Olympic champion Brianna McNeal, who has a history of eluding drug-testers as cleanly as she clears the barriers in her specialty track event, was upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Despite the obvious imperative of not even imagining missing a drug test after returning from a ban imposed for missing fucking drug tests, McNeal missed another one in January, blaming it on forgetfulness as she says she required a Jesus-certified abortion at around the same time.
While it’s normal to wonder how anyone expects excuses this porous to work, I wouldn’t have as much to do here if they weren’t, in fact, quite effective.
Below are the individual reactions—or resounding absences of expected reactions— to some news items I’ve seen as of Tuesday morning, along with a digression about what a positive THC test in track and field actually implies, provided I didn’t fuck that part up.
Regarding the general Richardson media campaign, the primary narrative has been that because THC shouldn’t be considered a banned substance, Richardson simply shouldn’t be punished for using it. The idea that agitating for a rule change before the dumb rule causes problems for a beloved athlete seems to have been neglected.
Letsrun front page, 7/5/2021 The most striking aspect of this story is that the least perturbed observer on record is Sha’Carri Richardson herself; despite her own apparent humility—suggesting that athletes who display flamboyant arrogance while competing don’t necessarily see themselves as beyond reproach elsewhere—almost everyone else in the media carried on in much the same vein as they had after the Houlihan revelation, behaving as though some grand injustice had been perpetrated rather than the enforcement of a dubious rule.
Meanwhile, in a twist that the Houlihan affair lacked, various politicians, Hollywood bozos, and other self-important ignoramuses flapped their Twitter-lips in ferocious indignation, with the general message being let Sha’Carri run! According to sources, Richardson gathered about 400,000 new Twitter (or maybe it was Instagram) followers in the wake of her ban.
It’s tempting to attribute this difference in attention to Wokism alone, given that Richardson is black and hot in every way, but I don’t think this properly credits how indignant—properly so, in my estimation—the general public is to discover that THC is a banned substance in worldwide athletics. Even those who have been led to believe that Houlihan’s ban was a miscarriage of justice (and a high number do) grasp the relevance of a positive steroid test. Also, everyone acknowledges that the 100-meter dash is cool, because raw speed is cool. Most sports fan don’t care how long someone can run at 80 percent of top speed even if it hurts, because 80 percent of top speed is not 100 percent of top speed, and if an event is long enough to accommodate a commercial break, fuck it.
(In a sideshow, a horde of Wokish under-30 Twitter users learned thanks to the Richardson ban who Florence Griffith-Joyner was, and were able to deftly conclude in a matter of minutes that all Flo-Jo doping stories are nonsense because she died in her sleep of something described on Wikipedia. These folks are quick learners.)
Sorry to hide this all the way down here, but Sarah Lorge-Butler, as she often does, wrote a short, deliciously newsy summary of the Richardson ban for Runner’s World. One thing I dislike about this charade is that it requires Richardson to pretend she’s not a regular marijuana user if she is in fact one, as if weed is something a sane person would resort to only under extreme emotional duress rather than something anyone should be able to use to relax, given the range of medications athletes are permitted to take (per doping authorities) for anxiety and other mood disorders.
Is Richardson likely to be a regular user? While I may have missed something, I don’t recall a mention of Richardson’s actual THC levels in any of the stories about the ban. This is relevant, because it’s not enough to merely “test positive”; receiving a ban for marijuana use requires sufficiently high urine levels so that the athlete is either a chronic pot user, actually toasted by most standards during the actual competition, or both.
From the USADA website, the threshold is 150 ng/ml. It appears, however, that the threshold was raised by WADA at the beginning of 2021 to 180 ng/ml.
These urine levels are 30 and 36 times higher than the 5 ng/ml that can be sufficient to convict someone of a marijuana DUI in Colorado, although I believe that for this to happen, you’d have to be driving really, really badly and not just stink head to toe of bud. Maybe.
The graph below shows urine THC levels vs. time in three subjects who smoked one joint and were otherwise non-users or infrequent users. The urine samples in two of the three subjects never got to 180 ng/ml (red horizontal line), while the third was in that range from about 20 to about 24 hours after smoking. (Source)
So realistically, someone whose urine tests at above 180 ng/ml is probably a regular user; the odds of having that much THC in your pee at any point after even one humongous joint, assuming you’re tested only once, just aren’t that good.
Regardless, THC should be taken off the banned-substances list by WADA (as well as decriminalized by Uncle Sam).The first outlet to break the Richardson story was The Gleaner. This caught the attention of one of the sport’s most stalwart truth-modifiers, Women’s Running Erin Strout:
The Gleaner is based in Kingston, Jamaica, and began publication 187 years ago. I’m trying to figure out what it is about Jamaica that would lead a white American bray-monkey to dismiss a Jamaica-based media outlet out of hand (and in a second thunderclap of irony, balk at the prospect of fake news). It’s too bad the Icelandic and Norwegian presses were silent on the matter at the time.
On the McNeal front, Juliet Macur kneaded together an appropriately sympathetic piece for The New York Times, now a place respectful of the views of devout Christians who often do things they’re not supposed to. Ten paragraphs in, Macur gets around to mentioning that McNeal has already served a one-year doping suspension.
I laughed as I read this, even though I think I was supposed to cry. Not hard enough to draw blood, or scare the swallows dozing up in the rafters in the old barn where I sleep. But I laughed. This doesn’t even constitute a good stab at bad propaganda, and Macur presents McNeal’s Christianity as being as sincere as Donald Trump’s. (I will say, though, that nothing in the Bible prohibits elective abortion, and the Good Book even contains a handy if grisly recipe for inducing a miscarriage.)
Alison Wade referred lovingly to Macur’s story in the July 5 edition of the Fast Women newsletter, and comes across, as she increasingly does nowadays, as an indignant and scatterbrained tween:
She’s never tested positive for a banned substance, she has just missed too many tests according to the rules. Athletes who know they’re going to test positive for a banned substance will sometimes avoid drug testers, but sometimes missed tests happen because an athlete doesn’t answer their door or fails to properly update their whereabouts.
Strout contributed her own McNeal story to the sob-fest, with any hint of the fact that McNeal’s career has been a lively carnival of missed doping-control tests was saved for the seventh of ten paragraphs.
Wade didn’t devote a single word to Gwen Berry in that same July 5 newsletter. Neither has anyone else, but Wade puts out a comprehensive Monday-morning newsletter, and she mentioned Berry’s grievances the previous week:
While it’s poor form to mind-read, given the attention Wade devotes to American women’s track and field, something tells me she was aware of the exposed tweets—and Berry’s far more revealing reaction—and decided that anti-Latino and anti-Asian hate-spewing by the world-record holder in the women’s weight throw just didn’t rise to the level of social injustice that “I’m with you, but please, no politics on this website” does.
Lindsay Crouse, who doesn’t have the judgment of half a turnip, has taken dumps on her own keyboard twice in the past week, once to form a column mostly about Richardson and a second time to create a column mostly about gymnast Simone Biles. Because she is such an abysmal writer even when she appears to be trying, it’s easy to seize on this rather than emphasize that she is an atrocious steward of knowledge and reality itself, making up whatever she wants as she goes along, whether it’s getting Suzy Hamilton’s mental-health history wrong or “forgetting” she’s not supposed to trigger people with eating disorders by posting calorie totals.
I won’t waste time panning these now, but I was amazed to learn that Crouse’s columns supposedly have four different sets of eyes on them before they’re published. I am going to be contacting all of these people and not leaving them alone until someone explains why the column described here was published, and then I’ll start in on Crouse’s other atrocities. Crouse herself believes she doesn’t need to answer for her lies.
Assuming their morbid relationship remains intact, Molly Mirhashem evidently hasn’t yet assigned Martin Fritz Huber to repurpose the work of someone else for Outside Online content pertaining to any of these events. Remember, this publication is now just one more arm of the greater company now known as Outside that bought Outside Online in January when it was still Pocket Outdoor Media, Inc., also the proud parent of Women’s Running, Podium Runner and Trail Runner. All of these are now fully disposable and, to paraphrase Trey Parker and Matt Stone, shouldn’t be read by anyone.
The social media manager of Jackrabbit, which operates a number of stores in Colorado, did professional loudmouth and scam-artist Latoya Shauntay Snell a solid with a blog post claiming Snell has completed more than 200 races. It takes seconds to confirm that she’s completed closer to 114 races (that Athlinks page omits two from 2020 that Snell hasn’t “claimed” on Athlinks). The main idea was to celebrate this loathsome gadabout’s “authenticity” and explain how she tolerates social-media criticism, which the author wrongly portrays as being anti-fat rather than anti-bullying and anti-lying.
Whoever wrote this is either lazy or unwilling to fact-check, about right for a “social media manager,” and unfortunately his article just sucks. It would be bad even if the content were true, and little of it is. I’d like to meet Snell face-to-face and see how brave she really is, because if I asked her in my kind but persistent way to defend her claims and posts when she didn’t have the option of throwing up electronic walls, she’d probably crap herself in terror. All these blustery Instagram personalities and lie-factories are the same spineless nobodies in real life, outside the safety of their “influencer spaces” and Twitter accounts.
This latest cascade of ugliness adds nothing fundamental to the canon of misbehavior among pundits that we* didn’t already know. But it’s remarkable how many opportunities running-media types have had lately to not stagger straight into gigantic mounds of manure—to show both backbone and integrity—only to instead ram smack into the messes, bouncing unsteadily from one shitheap to the next and whining all the while about the smelly mean people.
I would prefer be despised for the rest of my life for boisterously pointing out hypocrisies like these than spend one moment in the mind of anyone perpetrating it, because, as much as I often seem to not like myself much, I’d absolutely hate myself for not only getting on a soapbox to unfairly damage someone’s reputation, but also declining to use that same soapbox when a newsworthy instance of racial animus really does arise.
Again, these pundits loudly decry anti-Asian and any kind of anti-”brown” racism (I conceded that they see anti-white racism as a fair strategy months ago). They also say, just as loudly, that if you’re a runner, dodging discussion of this topic is not an option. I would expect the confluence of these factors to produce a groundswell of upset here that just hasn’t occurred. Maybe it’s too soon after the holiday.
I know I can be prickly sometimes, but am I off base with any of this?
(Suggested reading: Freddie DeBoer on the comfortable emptiness of “antiracism.”)