This totally awesome version of professional track may soon (sniff) become a lot more expensive to watch
Plus a few collisions with collateral nonsense on Boston Marathon weekend
NBC Sports, including its online streaming service Peacock, has sold the broadcast rights for next year’s Diamond League track and field meets to FloTrack, probably the most widely despised distance-running-driven media entity in the sport’s history. Part of this animus lies in the persistently low quality of FloTrack’s videography and commentating, but most rests in FloTrack’s setting a high-for-the-industry price-point, essentially proving in the process that the sport isn’t as in-demand as its own fans—made up largely of cozy younger adults accustomed from birth to getting all of their screen-based entertainment for free—like to pretend it is, or should be.
One of two things seems to have caused this: Either NBC hasn’t been making much or any money from its track-and-field broadcasts and online streams, or the network is taking cues from Substackers who insist that pro track’s fan base, and some of its premier athletes, have coalesced into a swamp of petty, wailing, self-interested goons either madly pushing or captured by the ideologies of the authoritarian left, and therefore deserve no media coverage whatsoever. Accounting for basic economics, the first scenario, while less personally satisfying, gets the nod here from the editorial team.
Pro track athletes and the sport’s pundits—and most of the former now double eagerly and vapidly as the latter—unhappy about the change are assuming FloTrack won’t offer a Diamond League-only option for less than viewers would pay by using its standard monthly or yearly rates. Maybe they’re right.
Either way, some of the responses were unintentionally revealing. American long-jumper Tara-Davis Woodhall was annoyed that FloTrack turned off comments on one of its Instagram accounts, a move that fueled the company being speckled with digital bile elsewhere on antisocial media.
Davis-Woodhall may be unaware that blocking or ignoring input from interested others has become the industry standard among some of her or at least women’s athletics’ largest supporters. Citius Mag, Fast-Women, and virtually every harridan who considers herself a serious distance-running voice all flatly refuse to consider or even expose themselves to contrary input from the public. These types filter out and derogate their critics for the very reason Davis-Woodhall cites in her complaint about FloTrack: They know that their ideas—such as running interference for Americans suspended for doping offenses, backing anti-white racist liar-activists, and pretending that males who declare themselves to be females should be treated fully as females in the name of fairness for all—are categorically bad for the sport and for society generally.
But the pro-transgender, pro-doping, pro-racism, and pro-eater-cheater types don’t care about the health of the sport. They care only about themselves, and nothing they get at any cost satisfies their egos anyway—their need for validation, their quests to feel like a meaningful a part of a sporting enterprise with packaging that has become so unattractive that it’s no longer a useful minor property for a hoary old American multimedia giant.
Nikki Hiltz isn’t satisfied with pushing for child sterilization, lying without apology about the recent death of a teenage girl in Oklahoma, or advocating for “trans inclusion” at every turn. Now, she’s inflamed that she even has to live in the United States, the country the California native recently represented in an indoor global championship.
This is almost surreal. Outside the U.S., perhaps five percent of the world’s population would tolerate, let alone widely embrace, everything Nikki Hiltz stands for. She could have always given her reckless grift a shot in a more, tepid form in Qatar, Algeria, or Uganda, nations that have fielded a wealth of distance talent over the decades, and enjoyed a different athletic and citizen path through life. The presumed testosterone supplementation must be working extra well in Hiltz’s case, because ever for her this is a serious display of cajónes.
I don’t hate it here in the U.S. at all. I just enjoy making use of my freedom to express discontent, amusement, or both about my fellow citizens, some of whom are selfishly and needlessly degrading the quality of life for everyone else, and don’t like the prospect of this hobby being scuttled by unwell people supporting unbridled pathologies. That they are unaware of making their own lives more difficult in the process seems supported by aspects of the FloTrack-is-NoTrack fracas.
Beloved white-bashing traveling-circus-of-one Alison Desir may not be an official part of this year’s Boston Marathon festivities, and if that’s the case, she worked very hard last year to be excluded in the future. But she is planning to be in the city of Boston this weekend.
Desir evidently has a very selective lens when it comes to white mediocrity. Perhaps Kathrine Switzer, at least for this weekend, is engaging in acceptable Allyship.
I met Switzer when I was an invited runner at the 2002 Vermont City Marathon, where Switzer was an invited speaker. I actually invited myself to the race, as did others with low bib numbers that year, but Switzer probably did not. She struck me as someone with natural presence, a woman who would have been successful in life even without the saga of 1967 Boston Marathon in her breast pocket. But the fact is, Switzer has been successfully surfing on a 4-hour, 20-minute marathon for a remarkable fifty-seven years now. And a big part of her story is a big dude clearing a path for her by dealing with a far smaller, noisier dude who was harshing her roving mellow.
The event this “shakeout run” is advertising, the inaugural Every Woman’s Marathon, is an equity grifter’s dream. Set for November 16 in the historically Afrophilic Southern haven of Savannah, Georgia, the event is…what it is.
If Desir will be in Boston on Monday, the odds of her participating in or suborning some kind of false episode of anti-black racism from the sidelines are virtually unity. She knows now that she has earned a reputation even among running’s hyper-accommodating white Wokish people as being perhaps too much of a “disruptor,” a blurt or three too convincing in her “shtick” as an anti-white, anti-serenity, burn-it-all-down pure hater.