Running media aimed at women are fiercely determined to glorify rule-breakers and male deviants
As already postulated, Kara Goucher has spilled her heart into a moral void; the era of men with long records of ugliness coaching America's top women is, by design, never-ending
Earlier this month, American shot-putter Raven Saunders, the 2021 Olympic silver medalist and number-six all-time on the U.S. list (19.96m/65’ 5.75”), was suspended from track and field for 18 months for missing three doping-control tests within a twelve-month period, all in 2022. Missing such a test is called a “whereabouts failure,” even though technically no one has ever failed to occupy physical space somewhere about in the world.
Saunders, who finished fourth at last year’s USA Outdoor Championships and missed qualifying for the World Championships in Eugene, accepted responsibility for missing the tests. Much of the coverage of Saunders’ ban, like the story you’ll see if you click on the image below, tried to conceal this message, but in most cases intrepid readers could detect it anyway.
Set aside the obvious intent behind Saunders rushing to “accept responsibility” and the media amplifying this burst of magnanimity; the more the idea Saunders is trying to do the right things takes root, the more the background claim of “I have never used PEDs” is passively nudged toward credibility. (Someone needs to tell Glenn Greenwald that, at least when speaking, he continually uses “credibility,” or believability, when the desired word is “credulity,” or the propensity to believe.)
Also set aside any feelings you have about Saunders’ protest on the Olympics medal stand in Toyko, which even Fox News didn’t really condemn. Saunders is black, gay, openly mood-disordered, among the best athletes in the world, and quotable; moreover, the International Olympic Committee is so corrupt, I wish she had taken a dump right on the podium instead of merely crossing her arms in an “X” (representing the “intersectionality” of her various minority statuses).
What I found telling was the reaction to Sunders’ suspension by Alison Wade, who writes the Fast Women newsletter, now available as a website. (It’s too bad Wade didn’t import all of her old newsletters to Substack when she “moved” there in January, as this would have made it even easier to research and illustrate her numerous excursions into double standards and other dialectic infelicities.)
Wade has denied being pro-doping in the past. Perhaps she’s deluded enough to believe this, but anyone who makes excuses for a suspended athlete even when the athlete does not is undeniably pro-doping. Wade didn’t want Saunders punished at all, and everyone who is not pro-doping can see this.
And Wade is plain wrong about how easy it is for athletes in the testing pool to miss tests—anyone from the United States who does so can in almost all cases be assumed to be dodging them. Her quotes are cherry-picked, and her confidently labeling Saunders’ missed tests “accidental” represents her usual indeterminately distributed combination of moral deviance and mental incompetence.
It’s not surprising at all that in that same post, Wade talked up the value of Kara Goucher’s new book, a tome that to alert readers suggests that track and field has a rich, storied, and arguably blossoming doping problem. It wasn’t all about what she endured at the hands of Alberto Salazar.
Wade was plainly as eager as anyone else in the summer of 2021 to see Shelby Houlihan’s appeal of her four-year ban succeed.
But as a typical white, middle-aged woman who attended a New England liberal-arts college, Wade also thinks it’s wrong on principle to punish people of color—especially women, even more especially women who are gay or transgender, and ultra-especially women like these who identify as having imperfect mental health. Like a lot of “liberals” of her ilk, Wade believes that people of color need not to be treated as equals and given clear paths to success, but coddled because they actually aren’t equals ability-wise.
This kind of “liberal”—nothing more than an unpleasant authoritarian bug-person or a close relative thereof—believes that white educated folks like themselves need to not only advocate for ethnic minorities, but think for them too. This automatic condescension bleeds into all of the demands these pompous “liberals” make on misguided behalf of brown people, or at least brown Democrats, who consistently poll considerably to the right of white Democrats. It’s why people in the suburbs think that police presences in inner cities should be de-emphasized, which black people living there don’t believe at all.
These people are galactically stupid, yet they really think they’re so smart that they don’t have to defend anything they say. This, to me, makes them very easy to despise and malign without rhetorical bound.
In her weekly newsletter post on Monday, Wade included this snippet:
And in the e-mail newsletter sent out by Women’s Running on Tuesday, two of the three stories relate to Bob Kersee.
Of all the possible choices for Women’s History Month lionization, the hapless editors of this consistently self-immolating publication picked Florence Griffith-Joyner, whose world records in the 100 meters and 200 meters no serious track observer, not one, regards as clean. And they chose a 20-month-old story to do it.
Retired world-class sprinter Ato Bolton is great behind the mike, but he’s lying if he says he thinks “Flo-Jo” didn’t use steroids.
Flo-Jo’s husband was coaching her when she set her still-standing world records, but she was with Kersee before that.
According to another story advertised in Tuesday’s Women’s Running e-newsletter, Kersee, in addition to coaching American megastars Athing Mu and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, is also coaching U.S. sprinter Chloe Abbott.
That was a solid move by whichever editor left the transposed words in the subhead, given that it may have been the same person who recently complained that women deserve to be paid more.
About five weeks ago. I dedicated the second half of a post to Bob Kersee’s shady past. Although I have the advantage of remembering this unfold in real time, none of the pertinent information is difficult to find. He’s had a yen for “developing” young female superstars for a solid forty years.
One more time: These same sources are celebrating Kara Goucher’s newest book with unrestrained enthusiasm—nothing but full-on endorsements all around.
So why is it that women who have continually raged against abusive male coaches even without Goucher’s help, and are literally reading and discussing the book’s contents right now, are so happy to see Kersee—the “2005 Nike Coach of the Year”—coaching young women like McLaughlin-Levrone, Mu, and Abbott?
The answer is simple and scattered throughout the above paragraphs. Women like Alison Wade and the editors of, and contributors to, Women’s Running don’t care about doping or the well-being, long-term or short-term, of professional women track athletes. They have shown this with their desire to see transgender women and DSD athletes (i.e., males) compete for women’s Olympic medals, and as long as new world records continue to be produced, women who only pretend to care about women holistically will have things to tweet and write about in a way aimed at making themselves look better.
These ladies are in it for themselves, and they can’t help putting this on blast in every way they accidentally think of. Pretty much everyone who follows this sport now has ferret-like ethics to go with spinelessness, ignorance of the past, and rank blindness in the present. I hope I can stop writing about it soon, because I hate it and every one of the cross-eyed, slack-jawed, slime-slicked and floor-humping people involved. I also hate everyone else, but this alone is no argument for continuing to focus on something that is now almost entirely trashy news for garbage-hod people.