She has never taken full accountability for the multitude of ridiculous / disrepectful / downright idiotic things she's done, and continues to do. She has a Trump like ability to overlook her own (very many) personal shortcomings and always find others to blame.
Exceptionally talented with the intelligence of a bag of spanners
Well that is a difference. She is clueless and cocky while he is just cocky. If she talked and then finished 2nd at USA, she woukd have some credibility. He knows where he stands. She doesn't seem to realize that she is losing. She claims that she doesn't care or that everything is somebody else's fault.
Remember we're talking about LRC posters here. She is not liked here because she is an authentic, outspoken black woman.
There are plenty of black runners that are well liked. Her skin color has nothing to do with it.
Have you been on LRC long? Every black runner is the target of various vitriol. Of course, most white and A-rab runners are, too, as are the many women who turn down these future Eliot Rogerses.
I mean, I think SCR exhibits the classic, “I hate you, don’t leave me.” She courts negative attention and then is unable to handle it and is clearly too sensitive to criticism for an athlete who wants to be in the spotlight. When things don’t go her way, she reverts to the immature “I don’t care about track anyway” instead of being able to process her disappointment. She self-sabotaged at nationals and clearly cannot cope with pressure on a consistent basis. She badly needs mental health support or therapy before she completely destroys her career due to her unaddressed trauma and abandonment issues and recent abusive relationship that suggests she is repeating unhealthy patterns. I think she has a bad team around her, that the hype came too fast and she can’t live up to it, and that she is surrounded by sharks and enablers. I wish she’d get off social media, get some help in handling her emotions, and focus on running before she squanders her talent.
I can express all this criticism without calling her ghetto, talking about how wearing a wig or long hair means she wants to be white (and that she wants tattoos to cover her black skin or whatever), or calling her a hood rat or hood trash. It’s not that people don’t like her, it’s that they explicitly frame their increasingly hysterical dislike in rhetoric around her blackness. Someone is in here literally talking about her covering her black skin with tattoos and wearing a wig to look white and you think this thread is color blind?
I dislike her because she talks and consistently doesn't back it up. I don't care what she looks like if she performed when it mattered.
Her being black probably changes the vocabulary a lot of people use — for example, if she was white with nothing else being different, we’d probably call her uneducated white redneck trash for doing, saying, and wearing the same things. Arguably subtle racism but that’s not the real objection here. Any way you slice it she’s a low class arrogant individual that is a horrible role model. She generates page clicks and advertising revenue though so she gets a lot of attention from the media even though she’s probably barely a top 10 sprinter in the US right now. If that
I don't think the problem here is about how she looks and acts rather I think it's more about people's reaction to the way she looks and acts. For whatever reasons we now live in a culture where people are very easily offended and triggered even by someone they probably will never meet in person.
For what it's worth, I agree with some things with the original post. She does make you watch. But I've written a little analogy of her behavior that I think is pretty accurate.
Imagine back to your high school days.
A new kid, Sammy Richards, moves to your school and after a hot hand playing basketball against some JV guys in one gym class, Sammy starts talking about how they're the best ball player in school. The kid then goes out of their way to talk smack to the best seniors in the school.
Everyone can't wait to see how this mouthy new kid does against the big guns at varsity tryouts, but Sammy gets himself suspended for smoking pot and so doesn't get to compete against the best guys in the school.
He continues to talk smack, but eventually when they all play pick up at the end of the year Sammy gets his butt handed to him not just by the seniors, but by the JV kids too. Kid still somehow insists he's the best, just you wait til next year, but then ends up not making the first cut of tryouts anyway. Sammy then throws multiple public tantrums about how no one respects him. When his classmates talk about how he didn't make the basketball team on social media, Sammy threatens to sue them.
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If that kid was in your high school, on a scale of 1-10 how hated would they be? How brutally would they be bullied? How much time or goodwill would anyone have for them? It doesn't matter how talented the kid is, he's still going to be annoying as hell and very difficult to bring yourself to like.
The better analogy would be this kid has one of the best college basketball careers ever and drops 50 points in his first NBA game and starts talking about how he's going to be league MVP and win a championship before declining and not reaching those goals.
Even if you think she's a piece of crap, the sport is better off when it's best athletes are at their best.
And clearly she's one of the sport's best athletes at her best, even if she's also (as we used to call it) a headcase. Her underperforming is mental, not physical.
More talented athletes going for it= more stellar performances. It lights a fire underneath everyone else.
You just know that Elaine Thompson was using the anticipation of that rivalry as jet fuel when she blasted that 10.54 in Eugene last year. That kind of thing is the real magic in our sport, and I personally would like to see that 10.49 go down sometime before its 40th anniversary.
You don't get it. Huh.
I think most people are liked her when she originally came on the scene. Fast forward to being kicked off the Olympic team for smoking weed ( how lame is that? immature?). Forget the weed thing, diamond leagues last summer, where she could have redeemed herself, absolutely chokes. This year? Even worse, she is a loud clown that can't deliver. If she was executing with the antics then A+... but you act like that and can't deliver? Take a seat.
There are plenty of black runners that are well liked. Her skin color has nothing to do with it.
Have you been on LRC long? Every black runner is the target of various vitriol. Of course, most white and A-rab runners are, too, as are the many women who turn down these future Eliot Rogerses.
So should we assume that any poster that is critical of SCR or any African American athlete is a racist ?