The media's plan to stylize Sha'Carri Richardson as a heroine is failing, so expect it to continue
The public overwhelmingly supported the sprinter when she was banned for THC use last year. Scorn or silence may have left her better off than she is today
Sha’carri Richardson has been a world-class sprinter since the spring of 2019, when she turned 19 and ran her first and only season of outdoor track at Louisiana State University. Her times of 10.75 for 100m and 22.17 for 200m represented magnificent improvements over her best non-wind-aided performances (11.53 and 24.15) as a Dallas high-schooler, compelling her to turn professional days after the 2019 NCAA Championships, where she won the 100m and took second in the 200m.
Richardson signed with Nike. If this alone signaled a high likelihood of Richardson seeing her career ignominiously derailed, she all but cemented a mercurial athletic future by settling on Dennis Mitchell as a coach. Mitchell won the bronze medal at the 100m at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, bracketing this with bronzes in that event in the 1991 and 1993 World Athletics Championships. He was also banned for two years in 1998 after testing positive for testosterone, at the time notoriously blaming his incriminating lab result on various bacchanalian activities.
Mitchell has now been exuding the stench of unrepentant doping—not only as a participant but as a tacit PED ambassador—for nearly a quarter of a century. After he returned from his two-year ban, he ran on the 400-meter relay team that took first at the 2001 World Athletics Championships in Edmonton but was later disqualified when team member Tim Montgomery admitted to doping.
In 2008, Mitchell testified before Congress that Trevor Graham had helped Mitchell administer human growth hormone to himself. Mitchell for years had vehemently denied using the drug that had triggered his suspension, but now he was even admitting to using a second one. (Remember this template when Shelby Houlihan starts offering testimony to Justice Department suits in 2027 or so.)
Determined not to be typecast solely as a direct beneficiary of doping, Mitchell has sought to help others reach their illicitly amplified potential as well, among them Marion Jones, whom he directed toward the proper juice-merchants. His wife, Damu Cherry-Mitchell, tested positive for nandrolone in 1993. The two of them run a coaching outfit called Star Athletics, a business that also lists sprinter Justin Gatlin, twice banned for doping, as a client. And this dossier wouldn’t be complete without USA Track and Field at some point hiring Mitchell to coach a U.S. national relay team, which it did in 2014, much to the dismay of Juliet Macur of The New York Times.
When Sha’Carri Richardson began working with Mitchell three years ago, representatives of Nike no doubt soon became aware of the arrangement. Someone in the company may also have been aware of Mitchell’s CV, which implies that any human being who merely gets within sight of where the Star Athletics crew trains soon experiences incapacitating bouts of cystic backne and free-floating rage.
Richardson was eager to defend her choice, saying, “Y’all don’t have to worry about any doping situations coming from me. I back (Mitchell) 1,000 per cent.” Others were just as eager to question the pairing, among them Lauren Fleshman, one of the sport’s most strident voices against doping by athletes not coached by Jerry “what’s nandrolone?” Schumacher.
It’s unclear what Richardson’s progression since turning pro would have made had the novel coronavirus not delayed the 2020 Olympics and otherwise disfigured every aspect of American social, educational, and commercial life, in some cases permanently. As it was, she kicked off her pro career with a fourth-place 11.15 at the 2019 Prefontaine Classic, then placed last in the final of the 100m at the U.S. Championships the following month.
In 2020, in which no national championship was held, Richardson raced sparingly, recording wind-legal bests of 10.95 and 22.00 in addition to wind-aided 100m marks of 10.79 and 10.83. The 10.95 was third in the world that year behind Elaine Thompson-Herah (10.85) and Shelly-Ann Frasier-Pryce (10.86), with that pair underscoring the strange tendency of Jamaican women with hyphenated names to asymptotically approach bodybuilder status as they age. Her 200m time trailed only that of Shaunae Miller-Uibo of the Bahamas. Miller-Uibo’s 21.98 benefited from the maximum allowable wind1, and the Bahamas is also an island nation in the Caribbean.
In 2021, Richardson regained her form of two springs previous, rattling off three sub-10.80 100-meter dashes in April and June—one into a wind. She won the 100m at the Olympic Trials in June, but was soon disqualified after testing positive for cannabinoids at the Trials themselves and earning among the most ill-timed 30-day suspensions in sports history, as it knocked her out of the 100-meter dash at the Olympics and also negated her national title at the Trials.
To test above the allowable limit for THC, someone essentially has to be high when tested, thanks mostly to a chain of events set in motion in 1998 by Canadian snowboarder (and thus obligate stoner) Ross Rebagliati. I have no issues with this, given how many other painkillers people can legally cram into their systems. I’m with the people who think weed is not at all performance-enhancing and that WADA should remove THC from its banned-substance list. The second doesn’t follow from the first for all manner of reasons, mainly the global attitude toward marijuana.2 But I think most people worth listening to in track and field agree with the overall idea.
Predictably, however, the public narrative shifted from “This is a bad rule and should be changed” to “The rule should not have been applied at all to Sha’Carri Richardson.” Lindsay Crouse—a flagrant liar and genuine moron to whom writing such as “In her tweet, Ms. Richardson pointed out the obvious, and yet it needed to be said: She is human” reeks of gravitas, and who would have been shitcanned by The New York Times years ago had that place not become a fucked-up joke played on society by approximately the fifteenth rotten shitstain named Sulzberger to serve as its publisher—couldn’t help but spread her ever-more-generous asscheeks and shart up this frazzled mess of “support.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who since ascending to U.S. Congress has been ranked among the world’s dumbest living pundits by multiple respected sources, called for the reversal of Richardson’s suspension.
That clemency of course did not materialize and never could have, and after Richardson sat out the Olympic Games, she returned to action at the Prefontaine Classic in late August. There, she performed poorly, running 11.14 for a rare ninth-place finish in a sprint race. After the three Jamaicans who had medaled in the event in Tokyo finished 1-2-3 in times of 10.54 (0.05 slower than the world record), 10.73, and 10.76, NBC chose to have a microphone stuck in front of the mouth of Richardson, who in the course of an excellent, albeit not entirely strategic, rant advised no one in particular to “talk all the shit you want.”
I was tempted to be glad that she did this, because NBS deserved punishment for choosing to not interview Thompson-Herah after her near-historic effort. But then I remembered that NBC got exactly what it wanted and had good reason to count on no matter how well Richardson performed.
Richardson managed 22.45 (fourth) and 11.14 (second) runs in Europe in early September to end her season. She chose to not open her 2022 campaign until May 21, over two months after The New Yorker—now boasting the flavor and quality of the Huffington Post while having retained its longstanding self-important, “our farts smell better than yours” fonts—ran a fawning profile of her and Mitchell, a piece that among other niceties reminded us* that weed is legal in Oregon, so…..
Richardson was highly hyped coming into the U.S. Championships this weekend on the strength of a 10.92 at the Prefontaine Classic (now back to its usual Memorial Day Weekend spot) and a 10.85 in New York City. She was beaten both times, and enjoyed a slight following wind both times. I recently wrote about how NBC decided to handle Richardson’s 2021 suspension at the Pre Classic, said handling being a good way to distract us* from all the other drugs every world-class sprinter is understood to be using.
Richardson wound up running inexplicably poorly at the U.S. Championships, which I will review separately, with a spectacular level of appreciation for younger people along with the predictable denigration of almost everyone else involved. She chose to not grant any ranterviews this time after failing to reach the finals in either of her events, perhaps having grown wise to both her own rhetorical tendencies under duress and the media’s hunger to exploit it.
Chavez—who, though far more obscure than AOC, is also perennially ranked among the world’s dumbest and most dishonest pundits—was interested here not in conveying the information he typed but in establishing his status as an official sports-media person. And I would love to connect the dots in this way: Sha’carri Richardson told herself “If motherfuckers like him can even get into this tent, shit, I appear to have become a star in a delegitimized fuckin’ sport.” But that’s not what’s happening.
NBC has played a leading role in the media’s strange insistence on the public not only forgiving Richardson for poor medical-recreational judgment—surely ongoing, not episodic, but fuck that too—but in going fully in the opposite direction and framing her as someone who was shafted and who therefore should be every fan’s favorite. Not only is this asinine on its face, but it puts undue pressure on Richardson, whose bravado about how much she can handle is not coterminous with the level of shit she can evidently handle in reality. Also, there are other Americans in those events worth viewing as challengers to the many-headed, juiced-up Jamaican juggernaut in a few weeks at the World Championships.
If the media and Richardson’s admirers truly appreciate her for being her authentic self, then they’ll respect her selective interactions with reporters (as well as reporter-imposters granted media credentials for tonguing Phil Knight’s asshole, which can’t be close to a clean job given Knight’s age and exacting standards and Chavez’ demonstrated spasticity in everything). They will also see that, although Richardson brought her own temperament and social skill set to her professional career, they can’t make her be what they want her to be. They probably like that she’s no fan of anti-doping agencies or USA Track and Field. When she’s happy, she says so. When she wants attention, she seeks it—for example, she recently wound up on The Today Show entirely of her own volition and says she regrets the appearance. When she’s pissed, she peaces on out with a wave and a waggle.
She’s fun to watch and I was disappointed to see her miss the World Championships. Owing to her on-the-track fashion choices, she may become the first woman (or man) to record a sub-11 100 meters with one breast flapping completely free, ricocheting off her sternum at between 4 and 5 Hertz. I won’t say that her career is likely to end before its theoretical prime thanks to various dynamics—social media and Wokism chief among these—that never would have been in play twenty years ago. But none of the narrative-bending and repackaging of basic events she’s become cocooned within, not all of it with her explicit consent, seems to be doing her much good.
Actually, winds of all speeds are allowed at all outdoor track meets, and there is no way to charge them admission to help defray the havoc they wreak on races and the performance lists those races generate.
In Japan, for example, you can go to prison for over five million years for possession of a bong, or something similarly draconian. And it’s not hard to understand why, given the nation’s absolute reliance on working its population to death in small spaces and its consequent fear of anything that might chip away at the collective motivation of the workforce. Imagine a country of 150 million or so ludicrously industrious people all wearing costumes with a red cape and an “S” on the chest, and having the nationwide water supply suddenly be infused with kryptonite.