No, it's not. I'm a fan of a few sports, including running, and I consume quite a bit of sports commentary in various forms. I'd be fairly bummed out if it suddenly ceased to exist.
However, I do think it's worth remembering that athletes are real people with emotions, private struggles, etc. when we discuss them. I don't think it's unreasonable for a commentator to point out that an athlete has had a few bad races or has performed below her potential recently. I think that's probably pretty obvious to people who follow the sport enough to know who the athlete is, and she's certainly self-aware enough to recognize it herself. I also think it's prudent for a commentator to consider how they phrase that observation: do they lean into more dramatic, clickbait framing? Do they come at it from an angle about potential for improvement? Do they actually have to single out just one athlete in order to make whatever point they're trying to make about a team?
I also believe that there should be differences (not legally, but just thinking from a personal standpoint) in how we discuss college athletes who aren't getting paid, when compared to professional athletes who play sports as their career. Additionally, the media landscapes of less-covered sports like running are different from the media behemoths that move billions of dollars and employ thousands like the big four sports. This means that runners are more likely to feel that they're part of the same community as the media personalities that cover them or the fans that post about them, and thus expect a different type of person-to-person care or thoughtfulness. There's a different balance of power between a college cross country runner and a commentator employed by FloSports than there is between an NFL starter and someone on one of the endless podcasts that cover football. Some people may believe that there shouldn't be a difference between those two scenarios, but I think that to argue that there isn't one would be pretty obtuse around levels of notoriety, audience size, monetary compensation, maturity, etc.
As I mentioned above, I'm not wildly taken aback by Gordon's clip, though I can understand why people are expressing negative reactions to it in the Instagram comments. The point of my initial post here was to say that comments about how athletes in other sports have it worse are immaterial to how the particular athletes on NC State's team might have felt about this clip. They help neither those other athletes under worse scrutiny, nor the NC State runners (and if you've actually paid attention to studies of college athletes' mental health, maybe we should want to be helping, or at least not harming them!). All comments like that serve to do is to minimize people's concerns, and I just generally think that's weak from both a logical and ethical frame of reference. That's all.