World Athletics Championships notes: An interlude about bad rules

Women are already being handed a 10 to 12 percent deficit at the starting line in some events, though this may soon change

The NBC 2022 World Athletics Championships announcing team dedicated at least fifteen minutes the other night to not just Devon Allen’s true-as-can-mathematically-be-yet-still-false start, but those of other sprinters who have suffered disqualifications thanks to the rule imposing a false start on anyone determined to have left the starting blocks within 0.1 seconds of the firing of the starter’s gun.

I got an e-mail chiding me for this portion of my response to the Twitter reaction to Allen’s fate:

Anyone who says he shouldn't have been disqualified is an idiot and is not a serious sports fan. Such observers are likely to side with Shelby Houlihan, Wokish nonsense (especially double racial standards), and other currently voguish forms of sleaze.

I agree that this passage is somewhat overcooked. But I was referring not to people who think the rule is bad—I also wrote “The rule might suck, but sprinters themselves never seem to complain. It was an agonizing (to some) but clear-but rules violation”—but to observers who seemed to think that Allen should have been allowed to run “under protest,” as Allen himself seemed to think might be an option in his refusal to leave the track.

The tableau depicting Allen lingering in a semi-intense sem-daze around the start area on Sunday night was reminiscent of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, when defending champion Linford Christie of Great Britain was disqualified from the 100-meter dash after leaving the blocks 0.086 seconds after the gun. Ironically, Christie himself had begun pushing for the implementation of the rule in 1991. And in 2009, Canada’s Donovan Bailey, also an Olympic 100-meter gold medalist, agreed that a rejiggered, even more draconian version of the same rule (one false start of any kind and an athlete is out) was good for the sport, though his justification was “better for television.” Last year, after a spate of germane disqualifications at the Olympics, Toronto Star columnist Jeffrey Rosenthal proposed an interesting Vegas-style rule for ironing out any effects of anticipating the gun even subliminally based on simple experience in near-identical settings.

As the NBC announcers pointed out, the current rule is founded on the at-least-questionable premise that anyone leaving the blocks sooner than 0.1 after the sound of the gun has necessarily anticipated the gun, owing to absolute constraints on human reaction time. I will grant that the science underlying the jumping-the-gun rule—fair as the rule may be in targeting all athletes equally—may not offer sufficient evidentiary support for the rule in its present form.

Nevertheless, this isn’t nearly the dumbest rule World Athletics now has in effect. But the announcers weren’t going, and will not go, within 100 meters of the wacky rule in place since 2018 allowing DSD persons, who for all physiological purposes are male, to compete in events shorter than 400 meters and longer than 1,500 meters, but not in the 400 meters, 800 meters, or 1,500 meters.

The announcers, or really the producers, won’t touch the topic for two reasons. One, if they were honest, they’d have to explain that the rule is absurd, which is always risky even if the explanation is clearly fair and accurate. And two, if NBC is going to ruffle any feathers from Eugene this week, they’re not going to risk contradicting Wokish narratives in the ruffling, even narratives rapidly losing their manufactured cultural momentum in the shit-caked Twitter henhouse and elsewhere.

World Athletics President Lord Sebastian Coe—a past attendee of the World Economic Forum who epitomizes white male privilege like no one alive except for the ferociously inbred unfortunates occupying Buckingham Palace at any time—chose this week to express his disdain for the rule as well as its ignorant supporters among the spectating rabble:

“We’ve always been guided by the science, and the science is pretty clear: we know that testosterone is the key determinant in performance,” [Coe] said.

“I’m really over having any more of these discussions with second-rate sociologists who sit there trying to tell me or the science community that there may be some issue. There isn’t. Testosterone is the key determinant in performance.”

Coe insisted it was his responsibility to “protect the integrity of women’s sport”.

“We have two categories in our sport: one is age and one is gender,” he added. “Age because we think it’s better that Olympic champions don’t run against 14-year-olds in community sports. And gender because if you don’t have a gender separation, no woman would ever win another sporting event.”

I’m sure this nattering will go over well with post-liberal leftist-feminists Web-wide, especially given Francine Niyonsaba’s stress-fracture-induced absence from this year’s World Championships and Caster Semenya’s failure to advance to the 5,000-meter final. (Semenya deserves credit for working hard for the past year-plus at the 5,000 meters as a natural 400m/800m type and getting down to 15:31.50 this April.)

But my question is, has Seb Coe been in a cigars-and-wine coma for five years? He’s been World Athletics president since 2015 and involved with the governing body for fifteen years. Asleep at the switch four years ago, he’s now gruffly positioning himself to be a savior of women’s athletics. Lindsay Crouse would not approve! (By the way, how deluded is Rich Roll? I know he thinks he’s saved all of Bangladesh from starvation lately by extolling the flatulent virtues of his all-swamp-grass diet, but this hilarious hagiography is what happens when one nonstop autofellator invites another onto his podcast for a floor-humping chat.)

In a few years, DSD athletes will be ineligible for high-level women’s competition, and the NCAA will have changed its current rule allowing transwomen to compete as women after twelve months of androhen suppression. And if any of today’s “feminist” running journalists and Twitter-heads are still playing the online pundit, most of them will pretend that they were never advocates for the insanity they were willing to cancel people for opposing not so many years before. Many will delete scads of relevant tweets, though their dogshit op-eds and Women’s Running bleatorials will stand as evidence of their opt-in lunacy.

That’s the luxury of even the most demented and counterfactual in-group virtue-signaling: As long as thousands of people are knowingly shouting something stupid at the same time, each contributor to the bullshit can later offer something akin to a silent Nuremburg Trials defense: I was just following Wokish orders.

Not everyone has a short memory.