The good and bad varieties of "elitism"

It's surprisingly hard to convince people that a wallet is not a substitute for talent

In the course of researching something unrelated, I came across an unfamiliar Letsrun thread from over six months ago in which someone linked to my post about a pair of proposals to expand the Olympic Marathon Team Trials to approximately 500 men and 500 women. Another poster, who flies by “moist,” offered some brief and contrary input that was unremarkable except for revealing how clueless some people are about the very point I was trying to make, which is simply that the Olympic Trials should be set aside for the very best athletes.

Condescending, sure; I’ll happily cop to that, as I see no other way to respond in an honest way to patently silly ideas. The even more severe “contemptuous” might even have been fair. But the rest of this post is just strange. In my article—and this is all easily you know, checked—I spent no time lamenting the technology of the early 2000s, and dedicated exactly this much to the phenomenon of social media:

Everyone with a social media account is now, at least to my brain, a TV personality in the making; I’ve now seen “films” including almost everyone I know.

As for my ripping the leadership of USATF, well, I’m not exactly the first to do that, with the Houlihan pseudo-reinstatement circus on the eve of the Olympic Trials being that august organization’s latest testament to its own galactic incompetence.

It’s also unclear what in my essay implies that I assume anyone who wants to expand the Trials has selfish motivations, but even if I did, and even if I was completely wrong, this has no bearing on the validity of “grow dem Trials!” arguments. Neither do, or course, complaints about my regard for USATF, social media, or different racing shoes.

But one in the comment thing did grab my attention: Calling my essay “elitist.”

It’s interesting how that word has become purely a slur, rather than seeming to retain any of its original sense of “some people are better at things than others.” From Merriam-Webster:

I am of the mind that if the U.S. stages a “trials”-style marathon footrace to choose its representatives in that event for the Olympic Games, then the very best of its best marathon runners should be given the “special treatment and advantages” their proven ability has earned them. This includes, in my view, having a race limited to about 100 runners of each sex. I can say this without resorting in any way to adopting the second definition and looking down on slower runners as humans even though their times aren’t national-class.

But also consider this: “His ONE valid argument is the cost of supporting a larger race. This is pretty much negated by having non-A standard qualifiers pay their own way, though. Otherwise this is elitist drivel.”

Now it’s time to latch on to another, more colloquial definition of elitism, this one far more apt: The idea that someone should be able to compensate for a lack of proficiency by buying their way into a club their talents alone fail to qualify them for. How is this—”Fuck you, we can buy the Trials”—not an archetypal example of the bad kind of elitism?

So, yeah. If you want to raise money to get more 2:19 and 2:45 types into the Olympic Trials rather than participate in fundraising that helps genuine elites, it’s obviously self-interest at work.

I see no real hostility here, and I’m unbothered by the fact that this was posted anonymously on a message board. What is distressing is how oblivious the post is. I have a difficult time believing whoever wrote it would ever openly claim responsibility for it—not, again, because it makes the poster look mean, but because it makes the poster look intentionally stupid.

“Ghost of Brian Sell” posted a response that practically blew another brand-new irony meter even though I always set the gain as high as possible when visiting the Letsrun board.

The fact that this comment is mostly free of grammar mistakes while being incredibly ignorant makes me think it has to have come from one of the running-media types whose chronically abraded and joyless inner thighs and tender-bits became further chapped when I started chronicling their lowbrow conduct on Substack. It seems almost safe to bank on it. Look how much effort goes into trying to delegitimize this site as a whole and my state of mind, and insist it must consume all of my time (it doesn’t), rather than sticking to anything specific about the article.

But being a fan of my collaborations with Jonathan Beverly, “Ghost of Brian Sell” might have noticed that, at the time, I’d had ten articles published by Podium Runner in the previous year-plus, all edited by Beverly. (He, or some human dungheap inside the recently amplified Outside conglomerate of Wokish nonsense, deleted those articles earlier this year.) How many keystrokes and clicks would it have taken to figure this out?

This miss adds a great deal of dimwit-gravitas to the “lives in his own head” and “is incredibly out of touch” stuff. Another irony meter blown. How many of those damned things am I going to flash-fry just from visits to the Letsrun message board alone?

No wonder these people don’t want their names attached to what they say. It’s not that their comments are mean, it’s that they are amazingly stupid and almost appear to have been written for the purpose of self-humiliation.

Not because of this finding, which is more amusing than dispiriting—how can I not feel superior to these smugly stupid assholes?—I may spend the next week doing writing that doesn’t require me to be connected to the Web at all. By exposing myself willingly to an ever-more-giddy demonstration of institutional and personal involutions and misdeeds by practically everyone in sight, I’m putting myself at real risk for being unable to see how many solid people are still contributing to running—every day I have to talk myself into remembering what a small and focused segment of miscues and idiocy I have chosen to focus on, and how little the collapse of the running outlets, sad as it inevitably is to me, doesn’t mean a whole lot to the competitive running world.

I won’t be “gone” long, though. You can see that this is exactly what the liars and cowards would like. And you can see how events like the Houlihan ban are revealing to more and more people just how bad the very people I’ve been writing about for months really are. If the idea is to make me look like a genius just for hanging around and taking notes for long enough to see all of them splat face-first into the ground—or more accurately, realize that’s where they’ve been all along despite the present thrill of riding a corrupt cultural wave—they’ll probably get their wish.