The image-management gymnastics performed by NBC's Prefontaine Classic broadcasters
Everyone must be thrilled about having to stick to a Nike-friendly script, especially Kara Goucher
Executive summary: The latest generation of professional track and field broadcasts served up by NBC are a joke. They’re intended to sanitize inconvenient behavior by top American athletes while supporting the delusion that club-level males being allowed to dominate women’s races—and their coverage—represents social progress for women. Expect exactly the same kind of messaging from “The Olympic Network” during this year’s World Championships. Among pundits at established outlets, only the men and women of Letsrun.com—whose collective attitude is “Running is a third-rate sport, but it’s still a sport”—seem to consistently able to cover and hype running as an athletic endeavor without inserting their egos or their grievances into that hype.
Last weekend’s Prefontaine Classic at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon—a $4.8-trillion shrine to Nike’s corporate largesse—was the third of the thirteen meetings on the 2022 Diamond League schedule and the only DL contest staged on U.S. soilage. With Hayward Field having been selected to host this year’s World Athletics Championships, the Pre Classic also provided a preview of the venue at which the world’s most proficient joggers, hoppers, and object-tossers will compete for global medals in August. On June 23, the four-day U.S. Outdoor National Championships, organized and presided over by Nike-run USA Track and Field, will begin, also at Hayward Field. Think of the 2022 U.S. National and World Championships as the Midfontaine and Postfontaine Classics, respectively.
“Prefontaine” started as a simple surname and has gradually expanded into meta-religious incantation, one that reliably summons foundational ideas like “Eugene is blessed to be track central of the world; Hayward Field is its church, and Nike is its god.” The only one of these claims with any empirical support is the last one.
The NBC broadcast of the Pre Classic included a suite of capable announcers—Leigh Diffey, Sanya Richards-Ross, Ato Boldon, and Kara Goucher. But from the very beginning of the broadcast, it was clear that the announcers would, apart from whatever action unfolded in front of them, be reading from a script.
This started when Richards-Ross said that American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson had missed the Olympics last year after she lost her mother and “subsequently made poor choices.” What poor choices? Did she decide to live solely on Captain Crunch? Ride a motorcycle without a helmet across the entire country? Despite knowing its viewer base was armed with smartphones and computers, and consisted overwhelmingly of established track fans, Richards-Ross didn’t elaborate further.
The same essential thing happened when Christian Coleman lined up for the 100 meters. Boldon said that Coleman had been suspended for “whereabouts failures,” but didn’t specify that this counts as a doping offense. (WADA loves suspending athletes for whereabouts failures, as this helps prop up the idea in fans’ minds that athletes are far more forgetful than juicy, and that the sport is thus basically clean.)
Richardson and Coleman are both Nike athletes. Perhaps the announcing crew was discouraged in advance from speaking too much truth about anyone boasting a swoosh who’d experienced recent unscheduled administrative career interruptions. Then again, a huge proportion of top track and field talent wears a Nike uniform. so that speculation could be unfounded. It’s more likely that NBC had adopted the obvious, if unspoken, policy of not speaking ill of nonwhite people for at least a little while longer no matter the scenario or broad cultural milieu.
Whatever was going on there, the nonsense really started flying when Francine Niyonsaba lined up along with a cadre of women in the women’s two-mile. Niyonsaba is for all physiological purposes a male, with internal testes and no womb or ovaries—someone touched by a rare blip in embryonic development. That World Athletics knows that including these humans in women’s races is wrong is evidenced by the governing body presently banning so-called DSD persons only from certain events starting in 2018—the 400 meters through the 1,500 meters. In the sprints and longer distances, Niyonsaba and a few others have already won global medals and set world records. World Athletics understands that it has fucked up and is now just sitting on its hands while women’s athletics remains a mixed-sex affair at the top levels of running.
Of course, the Wokish see the selective bans as a mistake in the other direction, and believe that the “flourishing” of Niyonsaba et al. represents just the kind of progress female sports have been long awaiting. Let everyone run everything in the name of fairness, especially since it keeps a bunch of old maids and couch-potatoes “happy.”
Alison Wade of Fast-Women likes to complain, often with merit, of the tendency of television and livestream producers to not give women racers adequate camera time. Well, during the Pre two-mile, after Niyonsaba established close to an 80-meter lead, there were no women shown in the race at all, just the Burundian far alone in front, trailing an admittedly impressive mop-like hair ensemble that was borderline hazardous for all involved.
If everyone watching running is okay with this furiously massaged brand of sports coverage, great. But I often hear bitching about how well other sports are doing in terms of visibility. So, even though everyone knows track will never grab a significant share of the American television audience, it makes at least some sense to notice how controversies involving athletes in big-time sports are covered by the media.
Imagine an NFL broadcast in which some player—white or black—recently suspended for drug use or domestic violence was said to be out of action because of “a regrettable decision,” with no further details given. Or an NBA broadcast in which a player suspended for an entire season for roaming into the stands to punch some folks returned with a new name and was merely said to have been sidelined to deal with “personal anger issues.”
The idea isn’t to over-punish people for committing common personal or sports-ethics miscues. It’s so those of us who still harbor the illusion of living in shared reality can more easily prop up that illusion. It’s so that the commentators hired to do these broadcasts can offer their complete wisdom rather than have their names and reputations leveraged to push bullshit-encrusted narratives from on high.
Letsrun.com, not for the first time, made hay of the schism between the legitimacy of other sports and that of running when 800-meter goddess Athing Mu withdrew from the Pre Classic only a few days in advance. Initially, she gave no explanation, but later revealed that she had gotten Covid.
This would not happen in a major professional sport. The Golden State Warriors would not announce four days before a game that Stephen Curry isn’t playing and refuse to provide any sort of explanation why. Yet that is exactly what is happening here as one of America’s biggest stars is absent from one of the biggest track meets held on American soil. The fans deserve better.
I appreciate how the men and women of Letsrun un-self-consciously dedicate their lives to covering running while acknowledging that the sport itself is held to practically no standards either from within or by the public. Within the past few years, the Johnsons replaced the site’s original, longstanding tagline, “Where Your Dreams Become Reality,” with “Running’s Homepage.” But they could have used “Running Is a Clown Show, But It’s Our Clown Show” instead.