Sonia O'Sullivan just wrote the most powerful advocacy piece for women athletes in years, and running's "feminists" are ignoring it

Another reminder that to the Wokish and the otherwise morbidly resentful, "justice" and "fairness" mean social arson and wrecking what others have built

Sonia O’Sullivan is one of the all-time distance-running greats. Now 52, she won five individual medals at global championships: A 1,500-meter silver and a 5,000-meter gold at the 1993 and 1995 World Athletics Championships, wins at both the long-course and short-course races at the 1998 World Cross Country Championships, and a 5,000-meter silver at the 2000 Olympic Games.

Perhaps O’Sullivan’s most supercharged career moment was her winning the first track 10,000 meters of her life at the 1998 European Championships with one of the most rousing finishing kicks in memory. O’Sullivan had a somewhat ungainly elbows-out style, but in full flight all of that disappeared and she just ate up ground like no one else in her day. The last lap of the 10,000 starts video below starts at the 16:30 mark of the video below, which also includes her subsequent win in the 5,000 meters at the same championships four days later.

O’Sullivan also ran under four minutes for 1,500 meters in four straight years, with a career best of 3:58.85. But her most objectively impressive performance was in a 3,000 meters London’s Crystal Palace on July 15, 1994.

O’Sullivan started the race as the 13th-fastest woman of all time in the event, trailing the five “Ma’s Turtle-Soup Army” Chinese at the top of the list who had all run between 8:06.11 and 8:21.84 in the same Beijing race the previous year, four Russians from the 1970s and 1980s, two Romanians from the 1980s, and a highly decorated and pissy American who would flunk a doping-control test at the U.S. Olympic Trials two years later. I don’t know if O’Sullivan was running clean, but those dozen athletes collectively represent an athletic Superfund site. Sullivan blasted an 8:21.64 to shoot to fifth on the all-time 3,000m list.

O’Sullivan is still fifteenth on that list despite the passage of almost 28 years, a lengthening parade of ultrafast Ethiopian women, the introduction of superior track-racing footwear, and the deliberate inclusion of selected non-female athletes in international-level women’s racing. Now ranked fifth all-time is Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba, raised as a girl thanks to the ambiguous-at-birth external genitalia of those born with certain disorders of sexual development (DSD), but possessing none of the specific physical characteristics—zero—of a human female.

All that to explain why O’Sullivan is in the news now, sort of. Her editorial “Transgender athletes cannot be allowed to compete in women’s sport” published in the Irish Times on Friday should be the topic of intense discussion among running’s female pundit class, but so far it hasn’t even drawn a peep of acknowledgment from any of them.

O’Sullivan begins by explaining how the reactions to the Lia Thomas-collegiate swimming farce should inform the moves of Seb Coe, the president of World Athletics, considering that in November, the International Olympic Committee in essence told the governing bodies of individual sports that setting transgender and DSD policies was up to them. At the moment, no limits exist on reformatted males of some type participating in women’s races at the highest level of sport other than the events 400 meters, the 800 meters, and the 1,500 meters.

O’Sullivan points out that the slow march of men with DSD onto the podiums of women’s awards ceremonies the sports world has seen in other events was as predictable a consequence of World Athletics’ policies the steady trickle of transwomen (males) into the same venues, and that Lia Thomas will soon not be a one-off of sorts unless governing bodies decide to act sanely and return women’s sports to women.

Key excerpts:

For me the only solution is to front up on the matter, not sit on the fence here, and decide that transgender athletes cannot be allowed into women’s events. We need to be certain about this.

I don’t think that DSD ruling went far enough, not even close, limiting it to events from 400m to the mile; it should have been across the board. If, say, you’re a male 800m runner, who doesn’t run 5,000m, you’re still going to be able to run around 14 minutes. Which is not very fast for a man, but it’s better than most women.

Right now we don’t have any transgender female athletes competing at the top of world athletics, and maybe we are getting a bit too concerned too soon, but maybe we’re not, when you consider we didn’t look at the DSD situation early enough. And still then, after 10 years, it wasn’t sorted our properly.

If I was at my running peak, and a transgender female athlete came along in my event, of course it would be a distraction. So much work has been done in recent years, particularly in this country, to give more respect and acknowledgement to women’s sport, the bar constantly being raised, elevating it to the same level as men’s sport, then something like this sets it back again, seeing a trans woman, within a relatively short time span, competing and winning as a woman.

Letsrun.com seems to be the only running-related media outlet to have linked to O’Sullivan’s piece. Gratifyingly, it did so with open gratitude.

Alison Wade, who also goes by Fast Women and whose pro-males-in-female-races stance is as solid as anyone’s, had every opportunity to address O’Sullivan’s editorial in her weekly Monday-morning newsletter yesterday; to speculate that she was unaware of it strains credulity. But Wade took a hard pass, although she again broke her own “power woman” rule about the need for running observers to steer clear of body-related chatter.

Wade v. Wade

I’m not going to pretend to not know what Wade is talking about when she implores people to go easy on “talking about people’s bodies.” Wade and a whole army of Wokish harridans are fine with body talk or imagery that doesn’t emphasize how widely humans vary in sexual-attractiveness capital. It’s okay to draw attention to someone else’s body as long as that person claims the mantle of “body positivity,” which is basically a declaration of no longer trying to compete with the enormous contingent of traditionally attractive, always vapid Instagram ass-wagglers. It’s okay to promote bodies that their owners have technically defaced or merely imagine to be something they are plainly not. It’s okay to speculate gleefully about what sort of tissue was removed from an elite runner’s body. It’s okay to emphasize and re-emphasize athletes’ sexual preferences, as long as poisonous concepts like “cis” and “hetero” are excluded.

But if someone so much as hints at the muscularity or shape of a woman athlete, or even the relative length of her limbs, that’s getting a little too close to lechery for the morbidly insecure, and so we get nonsense like this from the sport’s beetle-browed approval-hounds.

I’ve more than hinted here at who the real targets of running’s apparent man-haters are. When their actions all coalesce around reducing the status of athletically successful or aesthetically celebrated women, what does that suggest? Forgive me if I see far more the enacting of accumulated personal grudges than I do a push for any sort of progress in this.

Perhaps Women’s Running (ever eager to promote Niyonsaba’s “womanhood”), one of the Outside, Inc. hyperwoke publications, or Runner’s World will get around to responding. I expect RW to offer at least something, even if it’s just a dispassionate recap of O’Sullivan’s editorial. But someone out there should press the various self-appointed proponents of women’s running like Strout and Wade for their views here, because as longstanding categorical advocates for using men to degrade women’s running, they certainly have them.

But I think that crowd may be figuring out that once “big” names start chiming in on this issue, they won’t be able to maintain the illusion that what they are pushing for has any basis in science, competitive fairness, or anything useful. This, the spate of slovenly cheaters of color and gender-deviance being given gear and other swag when all they deserve is ridicule and shame—the whole display is just harpies lining up along the face of competitive sports with cans of spray paint in the form of incessant screechy tweeting and grifty donation buttons. When it comes down to actual discussion or confrontation, in the absence of social-media control mechanisms, they are cowards—fundamental weaklings who are fully aware of having embraced petty vandalism over legitimate support.