What makes athletes' bodies athletic is off-limits, yet their genitals remain an obsession
What makes athletes' bodies athletic is off-limits, yet their genitals remain an obsession
Acknowledging that body composition plays a role in sports performance is a bridge too far; meanwhile, color-coding athletes is supposed to be a good promotional strategy for the sport
Gabriela DeBues-Stafford graduated from a Canadian high school in 2013 with a promising personal best of 4:22.03 for 1,500 meters despite a diagnosis of Graves’ disease. Within two years at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, she had knocked that time down to 4:07.44. By the fall of 2017, she had represented her country at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro as well as that year’s World Championships in London, and trimmed her 1,500-meter best to 4:03.55. She had also run 800 meters in 2:02.48, an improvement of over eight seconds on her high-school PB.
Over the next year, DeBues-Stafford’s times stagnated, although she added an 8:45.67 3,000 meters to her résumé in July 2018. That fall, she began training under Andy Young in Scotland, and over the winter, she got married to a man she had known for over five years. The results of her new arrangement(s) were immediate, as DeBues-Stafford greeted 2019 with a 14:57.45 indoor 5,000-meters in Glasgow, her new training base. That was nearly 28 seconds under Megan Wright’s Canadian indoor best from 2011, giving DeBues-Stafford her first national record. Her 4:24.80 mile later that month earned her a second national record, and the avalanche was in motion.
In June, after a 5,000 meters in 14:51.89 the previous month that carved over three seconds from Courtney Babcock’s outdoor Canadian record, DeBues-Stafford took over two seconds off her nearly two-year-old 1,500-meter PB with a 4:01.28. That race would herald a steady march toward Lynn Williams’ 1985 Canadian record of 4:00.27. Ten days later, DeBues-Stafford ran 4:00.46, another sizable gain given that she was now operating in much rarer territory than 4:03.55 runners do. On July 12, DeBues-Stafford blazed a 4:17.87 mile in Monaco, signaling that she would have likely broken four minutes that day had the event been 109.344 meters shorter. Eight days later, she nabbed Williams’ nearly 34-year-old record by 0.01 seconds, then headed to Canada for the formality of winning a national title in anticipation of that fall’s World Championships in Doha.
At the Weltklasse Zürich meeting on August 29, DeBues-Stafford broke the four-minute barrier with a 3:59.59. Eight days later, she broke her own Canadian record in the 5,000 meters with a 14:44.12 in Bruxelles. On October 5, in a thrilling World Championship final, she dropped a 3:56.12 bomb that was good enough for sixth place. Among those who beat her to the line was Shelby Houlihan.
When DeBues-Stafford lined up for her first 1,500 meters of the 2019 outdoor season, she stood 279th all-time in the event. After the World Championships 1,500-meter final in October, she had risen to 21st, where she remains, behind a slurry of dopers both formally caught (e.g., Houlihan) and outed long after their best days were behind them (eight of the names ahead of DeBues-Stafford’s belong to Chinese runners from the 1990s, three refer to Eastern Bloc athletes from the 1980s, and one is owned by a Russian).
It should be noted that while the DragonFly ZoomX was not released to the public until late 2020, every Nike athlete in Doha in October 2019, DeBues-Stafford among them, was fitted with a prototype that assuredly featured ZoomX and carbon-fiber plate technology. At the time, no one knew to even look for “superspikes” or what they would look like from the outside, as if that would help anyway.
DeBues-Stafford credits her rapid 2018-2019 improvement, loosely, to finishing her degree (which took her six years; that may be typical in Canada) in early 2019 and being able to focus solely on running. In addition to getting a bump in training, a lot of athletes simply don’t function as well in a college environment. I don’t know how different it is in Canadian universities compared to the NCAA, either. But DeBues-Stafford’s move to Glasgow was concurrent with her getting married as well as coming to terms with some things about herself, as she was probably a happier, more relaxed person overall. Regardless, it’s a terrific story.
Roll that story into 2020, when Covid ruined everything and DeBues-Stafford experienced a recurrence of active Graves’ disease (an overactive thyroid). Before all that, she ran a couple of great indoor races, including a 4:19.73 at the Millrose Games. The combination of her irksome endocrine system and a pandemic put paid to the rest of her year, save for a couple of low-key summer races. But in July, having already moved back to Toronto after the Olympics were postponed, she decided to join the Bowerman Track Club. “Dance with the one who brought you” rarely seems to apply in distance running, where a single club wields a colossal amount of bargaining power. (By the way, I didn’t listen to the episode of Ali on the Run linked in this paragraph, but given how thorough the notes are, I would bet it’s a great production.)
Stafford returned to full action in 2021, though, as is typical of even the healthiest BTC athletes, she raced relatively sparingly. In addition to blasting a 1:58.70 800 meters in May, Stafford placed in the top half-dozen in a global-championship metric mile, winding up fifth at the Tokyo Olympics in 3:58.93. In her semifinal, she had run 3:58.28, so she left Japan with four career sub-fours to her credit.
Stafford has raced twice so far in 2022, winning both times. She rattled off an 8:33.92 at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix on February 6, and five days later won the David Hemery St. Valentine’s Invitational 5,000 meters in 14:31.38, another national record. Right behind her and setting an American record (14:33.16) was DeBues-Stafford’s BTC teammate Elise Cranny. Next month, she’ll travel to Belgrade for the World Indoor Championships.
This is a beautiful tale to chronicle, even though others have done it, and nothing that follows sullies it.
On February 14, Chris Chavez of Citius Mag posted notice of a just-released Run Your Mouth podcast featuring DeBues-Stafford.
So a woman who is married to a man wants to stump for LGBTQ+ rights, and her weapon of choice will be rainbow hair. All of this is fine, although I bet if you hunt around, Serbia has a panoply of other social ills just as urgent as the inability of the right of folks like DeBues-Stafford to get married there. Although, it seems that she actually could, but she wouldn’t be able to so easily live in Serbia as her full, authentic self. Pretty soon, if she stays in Canada, she won’t even be able to withdraw money from her bank account if she’s closely related to any truckers.
But if the rainbow hair works to effect social change, why wait? Why not always wear it like that? It seems that if this style is like kryptonite to opponents of LGBTQ+ rights, no proponent of said rights should forsake it for a single day.
Sorry, I can’t help myself, and I say the same thing about calls for mass prayer, which have historically often assumed the form of calling for God to limit LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. God is asleep at the fucking wheel, but if you can find the right salon…
I’m trying to not beat up on Gabriela-DeBues Stafford here. People have been publicly using the same joyous colors to send the same general message for decades. I have never been anything but an automatic supporter of gay rights and everything associated with the general premise of sexual and body liberty. What’s become notable is that people promoting the sport of running have decided that salient details about athletes’ bodies should be repressed at all costs, while at the same time inviting the kind of prurient non-running-related speculation their goofball blaring seeks to extinguish.
The host of the Run Your Mouth Podcast, David Melly, recently declared the four-minute mile itself racist. This white observer wrote, in apparent sincerity, “The 4-minute mile is a white man’s achievement. Our sub-four heroes, from Roger Bannister to Jim Ryun to Hobbs Kessler, tend to be white and are always male.” I suppose I don’t need to point out that the pool of sub-four female miles up for potential worship is currently very shallow, but I guess I might as well point out that David Melly is white, but his self-flagellation carries more than the usual Wokish gravitas here because Melly is also gay. Nevertheless, this is an amazingly dumb thing to add to the “That’s racist!” lexicon even when practically every definition now applies. (Also racist, by the way, at least according to the Instagram account @feminist? Removing body hair. So, try not to be, say, Italian or Lebanese, because your choices now apparently reduce to either sporting loads of back hair (or a maybe mad unibrow) or succumbing to yet another white-supremacist anti-virtue.)
Anyway, it’s clear that Chavez intends to milk Wokism within running for every dime it’s worth. Chavez, like his distaff comrade-in-doofus-coverage Erin Strout, has long sought to make a big name for himself as a journalist using track and field as a medium. He either quit or was let go by Sports Illustrated at the end of last year, leaving him free to focus solely on Citius Mag, which he created and operates, and where any spastic fuckups he commits therefore can’t rankle any higher-ups and threaten his job. He’s now free to write whatever he wants. But you’d never know it, because Chavez is incapable of producing a single original idea or writing anything that may diminish his potential popularity within the niche he has established and intends to expand.
In September 2020, Chavez, not coming close to believable outrage, tweeted out his indignation over a supposed instance of body-shaming, or body-talk, or whatever. Chavez may be a bumblefuck journalist, but as an idea-free attention-monger, he is ever and keenly attuned to the prevailing psycho-emotional winds swirling within the running-rabble comprising his target audience.
I wrote extensively about this in real time, but to again emphasize the obvious, the video is utterly innocuous to those of normal-enough mental status.
Nevertheless, this dubious signal found appropriately powerful and haughty sources of amplification.
Uh, ma’am? He was calling the race—you just didn’t like the words he spoke or failed to comprehend them properly.
Nine months later, Goucher, having been cast in an announcer’s role herself, decided to send out a 1.22-gigawatt virtue signal after committing the infraction of referring to the woman named Nikki Hiltz as a “she.”
Let’s pretend Kara Goucher really did feel physically ill after becoming aware of her public ersatz faux pas. Why, given her sensitivities, didn’t she feel even more nauseated after eviscerating someone who was by this time a colleague over nothing at all, and for apparently not even watching a clip she called “beyond disgusting”? That irony fries my guts so bad, I literally can’t even take it.
And what was that about “just calling the race”? And isn’t adhering to the whimsical personal-pronoun choices of women competing in women’s races the epitome of accommodating a form of fixation on women’s bodies?
I have to bring this full circle now, because I've been getting sporadic comments from people who think white men have no right to criticize black women, at least not Latoya Shauntay Snell. That is literally the entirety of the understandable portions of replies.
Goucher evidently follows Snell and empathizes with her invented plights.
I wonder if Goucher would care if she knew that Snell is in the business of taunting people with eating disorders in addition to, and there is no better way to put it, weaponizing her body’s ability to store triglycerides in adipose tissue. Meanwhile, every new sponsor or ally she secures blindly circulates her claim, easily established as false using multiple websites, that Snell has completed 25+ marathons. How is this any different from lying on a resume? The woman is a straight-up sociopath, and she’s getting claps from all directions.
Watch this display and try to convince yourself Snell is putting her all into becoming an athlete. Snell is nothing more than a thieving, mean, obnoxious vandal, and somehow, Kara Goucher, despite her own neuroses in this very area, thinks Snell’s bullshit-spew is worthy of praise. More likely she’s unaware of the sheer scope of it, but at some point…just think.
[February 23, 2:57 p.m. MST edit: Snell posted this Instagram story this morning:
Looks like Snell still a devoted Beck of the Pack reader, and now she’s clearly working her way toward “I never said I actually finished 25+ marathons!” Which is also a lie, so fuck her in advance for that.]
I understand that Goucher is not trying to be a villain here or in any of her public scrambling for whatever piece of the running pie helps pay the mortgage in athletic retirement. Most of this crap, and most of the similar conflicting and oddly prioritized babble from others, is just people not honestly examining their own beliefs or even their own impulses amid a progressive and pathological shredding of the country’s political and societal norms. It’s easy to think you’re supporting BIPOC or LGBTQ+ platforms just because someone who belongs in one or more of those categories is being noisy on Instagram or Twitter, but just as often you may be supporting someone’s illegitimate pogrom against a valid critic, or basically agreeing that people afflicted with the mental illness known as gender identity disorder—often compounded by previously unplumbed depths of cultish solipsism—should be the primary arbiters of public policy.
Take this New York Times ad, spotted riding on a D.C. Metro bus in recent days:
I have no quarrel with the idea of keeping the focus on the races people are running rather than their perceived hotness (which is what the whole Chavez-inspired mini-reformation was fundamentally about). But when people are continually insisting that announcers put their sexual orientation from and center, they are inviting people to quietly investigate everything that goes with that. To be blunt, if you don’t want sex to be mixed up with women’s athletics, it’s a package deal. When you put stuff out there you know is controversial, don’t act like someone jabbed a pinky up your asshole when observers take that stuff in predictable directions.
In no way do I intend to associate anyone in this post with this Victoria’s Secret ad, but to me it exemplifies the treacherous Wokish confluence of trying to cancel opposing output and its creators while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of moral outrage. A model with Down syndrome is one thing, but in lingerie? I would speculate about issues of consent here, and the confluence of helplessness and post-pubertal womanhood on display here is inherently revolting. It has a distinct underage feel to it, and I suspect I’m not alone in this assessment.
In August 2014, Chavez wrote an article for FloSports (the parent company of FloTrack) about "a massive leak of nude and scandalous photos" that a U.S. Olympic gymnast was "reportedly a part of." The story even included a helpful link to this celebrated trove of nudes, making Chavez's use of "reportedly" farcical, but also making him and FloSports look bad. Joe Battaglia, then the company's head of content and now vice president-editorial of its atrocious Milesplit division, was unrepentant in real time.
In January 2021, this issue resurfaced when FloSports, a dismal company in every conceivable way, and USA Gymnastics agreed to a media deal. When women with memories pressed the parties involved about the photo link, FloSports issued a revisionist take on these events and a joke-apology rife in the passive voice. You can read about these events here.
I'm not saying that Chavez is a creeper or should be canceled for this transgression (the quality of his work alone should eventually bring about that outcome). But this inglorious chapter of his reporting history at a minimum suggests that his demand that no one objectify the female body was entirely contingent on external motivating factors.
Because I have a small car with cosmetic damage to the front driver’s side, someone recently sent me a Volkswagen ad from 1964.
This is real text from the ad, if you can’t see it:
Women are soft and gentle, but they hit things.
If your wife hits something in a Volkswagen, it doesn't hurt you very much.
I expect that people 25 years from now will laugh, mostly ruefully, that "trans women are biological women" was ever treated as a serious thesis, in the same way we can see the regressive hilarity today in sincere messages like "women drive badly, but at least they do it slowly!" from the 1960s.
In the meantime, choose your bastions of media wisely, and govern yourselves accordingly.
