Mary Cain and Chris Chavez's criticism of Ostrava W1500 commentating

bearcatRun1998 wrote:

"The very idea that any reporter would feel comfortable making mean-spirited or sexualized comments about any athlete - male or female - is disgraceful and unprofessional."

Maybe it was a good thing we moved our discussion to the Supporters Club only portion of the podcast.

My only question is what did he say that was mean spirited or sexual? I see nothing sexual at all. We have to make a leap of faith about his intentions to assume the chuckle was mean spirited. He could be just laughing because the bodies look so different. Women's long distance runners look like waifs and other runner's don't.

I Just went and looked up what events the other 2 pacers run.

I want everyone to guess.

I'll leave some space.

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HÁLOVÁ Kateřina is a heptathlete.

Zdenka Seidlova is a 400m runner.

Probably what most of us would thought.

And sport and society are pretty interesting. Women compete in way more revealing outfits than men. Instagram is full of athletes posing and showing presumably how good they look.

Yet even discussing someone's body type during a race should be off limits? I don't think so.

****

I think we are teaching the wrong message in society in general. What happened to sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me? Clearly words can hurt people, but now the standard seems to be "if someone says anything remotely you might not agree with take offense." If that is our course of action we are giving up our agency as we can't control what other say about us. Obviously a TV announcer should be held to a higher standard.

I highly recommend the book below:

This is why you don't feed the SJW's, they always come back for more attention from their outrage. These comments seem like more of a projection of her own insecurities than any real wrongdoing on the part of the commentator.

elitist wrote:

I do. They may not be the best announcers but they’re trying. Announcing isn’t that easy.

By extension, one could say that if your PBs aren’t within spitting distance of world class you shouldn’t be running. Allie’s times definitely fall short. By a lot. Maybe she shouldn’t be running?

Personal best(s)

800 metres: 2:11.30

1500 m:4:14.76

Mile: 4:33.5

5000m: 15:24.74

10,000m: 32:06.71

3000 metres steeplechase: 9:30.85

Announcing isn't that easy, but this guy isn't a track announcer and it showed. That 30 seconds of announcing was objectively terrible. To not say anything about the pacers going out too fast and leaving the field in the dust is pretty dreadful. Nearly every other announcer would.

Allie is closer to an elite track athlete than this guy is to a good track announcer. I've heard Ian Eagle and Gus Johnson do track. Despite no real track background, both guys fared much better and they certainly could understand the dynamic of bad pacemaking. Allie calling this guy out for having nothing of value to say when there was quite a race dynamic going on (Faith Kipyegon letting the pace go, and not chasing after a PB) is totally fair even if she's not an A1 athlete.

This is a simple sport, and being lean is a very big part of it. So, unlike Mary, I think it is possible to make an above board comment on an athlete's apparent strength/size without waiting for the athlete to spontaneously talk about it. Such comments are not inherently "mean-spirited or sexualized" though they certainly can be.

I also think she's being obtuse when she says "Athletes come in all shapes, sizes, genders, and from different background." Athletes aren't all clones, but this is a terrible description of high level sport. Within a particular event or role, there are generally very obvious tendencies towards particular shapes, sizes, genders, or backgrounds.

That said, the Ostrava 1500 commentary was awful. For 30 seconds of a 4 minute race, the only thing the announcer could think to say is "the pacers look bigger"?! Given the sensitive nature of body image, low/no value comments such as these should be left unsaid. The weird tone makes it worse.

I agree with Cain here, fresh voices in the sport would be wonderful. More female writers/commentators would be great, but I'll cheer for anyone who has something interesting to say, or can ask an interesting question.

TLDR - I agree with rojo. gross.

We had a capable female commentator in Carol Lewis, but people didn't like something about her voice, so now it's just all British dudes instead.

"With that in mind, why should any announcer ever feel comfortable passing judgements about how someone looks?...If it’s not a fun-fact coming directly from the athlete, don’t talk about it."

I would agree with everyone here that this is too narrow. I have no problem if an announcer calls a runner powerful, rangy, petite, tall, diminutive etc.

Obviously calling someone emaciated, chubby, ugly, easy on the eyes or something like that is unprofessional.

It is clear to me that Mary Cain may have specifically been triggered by the announcer saying the athletes had more muscle mass and chuckling. She took that as sexualized body shaming with not much evidence it was.

rojo wrote:

We talked extensively about this in the bonus portion of this week's podcast for subscribers. After vowing I was going to avoid the topic as I didn't want the woke twitter brigade coming after me, I decided I had to address this topic but we put it behind the paywall as I don't needlessly need people trying to cancel me.

I ended up talking about it as the left-leaning Jonathan Gault had the "gall" to objectify Ryan Crouser's body during our podcast. Jon talked about how Crouser was an athletic giant and said he thought he'd be perfect for the NFL based on the way he looked.

I couldn't help myself and had to jump in. "Jonathan, you absolutely CAN'T talk about an athletes body," I said with sarcasm.

BTW this is not a great ad for the subscription. $99/year for more rojo?

Meh. I remember watching one of K Touhey’s races on YouTube a while back and the announcer/commentator was clearly a track aficionado. And yet once the race started to unfold the best he could do was blurt out the name of the runner leading at the time. He would yell it out, and then scream it out louder, and then again louder. Announcing is hard. Maybe that comment was the best they could come up with at the time. Not many can do better. Not even track athletes. Seriously. It wasn’t that long ago that Amy Cragg was catching grief for bad commentating.

This is stupid. He's commenting on the muscle mass of the pacers, since they are shorter-distance specialists. Nothing even remotely sexual or demeaning about it.

A rough analogy would be comments about a football wide receiver's height or hand size compared to a lineman's weight or size, or a basketball guard's body type compared to a center, etc.

Ugh! "I talked to X,Y,Z's coach Amy Deem, and she said..."

every single time.

I like the Brits better. Will continue to lobby for Chris Derrick, who has a lot of potential. SRR is also very good.

Go back and watch the finals of the women's hammer in Doha, the FEMALE commentator at least twice(around 11 minutes and 10 minutes in the the video) mentions the size/build/etc of Ukrainian thrower Iryna Klymets. ANYONE who is a fan of track and field will see why anyone with an ounce of knowledge of the sport would see why the commentator would find the need to mention this.

https://youtu.be/mR0CUNrsoCs?t=670

LRC note: We changed the time stamp as they were incorrect as to where the comment was

elitist wrote:

Meh. I remember watching one of K Touhey’s races on YouTube a while back and the announcer/commentator was clearly a track aficionado. And yet once the race started to unfold the best he could do was blurt out the name of the runner leading at the time. He would yell it out, and then scream it out louder, and then again louder. Announcing is hard. Maybe that comment was the best they could come up with at the time. Not many can do better. Not even track athletes. Seriously. It wasn’t that long ago that Amy Cragg was catching grief for bad commentating.

You're being way too nice. It was a tennis announcer. He didn't really have much of an idea of what was going on throughout the meet. It sounds like your Tuohy announcer wasn't a track aficionado if they couldn't note splits at the very least or mention the potential records in play. Amy just seemed nervous and somewhat flustered as athletes often are on their first times as commentators. This guy wasn't that, he just didn't have much to say due to a lack of research and basic track knowledge. Commenting on rabbits going out too hard is extremely elementary. Cram or Hutchings would literally never miss that. And it's not just them - Dwight Stones, Larry Rawson, Masback, Lewis Johnson who all have their flaws wouldn't miss it either.

"Coddling of the American Mind."

Look in the mirror

coach tj wrote:

Cain is pathetic now. She's complaining about calling the pacers muscular. She will never be competitive in this sport again so she's trying to remain relevant as an activist.

If she cares about women, she would have spoken out long ago about Caster Semenya being a man in women's races. Or she could speak out against males converting to women then dominating women's sports in high school and college. Speaking out against those things would ACTUALLY help women, but she just wants to be the politically correct police.

Weird how these feelings get posted about again and Goucher but not someone like Chavez. Letsrun does not like outspoken women.

a lonely widow woman wrote:

This is stupid. He's commenting on the muscle mass of the pacers, since they are shorter-distance specialists. Nothing even remotely sexual or demeaning about it.

A rough analogy would be comments about a football wide receiver's height or hand size compared to a lineman's weight or size, or a basketball guard's body type compared to a center, etc.

Eh. I think the comparison to football players isn’t really a fair one. There are positions in football that you literally have to be big in to play. You can’t play tackle if you’re 5’7 and 120.

Now you can say the same thing about running, but guys like Solinsky, Mottram, Wheating show that that’s not always the case, even if they are exceptions.

It’s mostly the overall tone, especially the laugh beforehand rather than the comment itself, IMHO. If he’d just said, “the pacers are powerfully built runners because they’re sprinters”, I think that would have been fine (I’m a woman, just FYI for any LRC newbies). But it would have prob been best to just comment on the race itself.

same as it ever wuz wrote:

[quote]coach tj wrote:

Weird how these feelings get posted about again and Goucher but not someone like Chavez. Letsrun does not like outspoken women.

I think you're right in many cases, but in this specific instance Goucher and Cain are two of the most well known, influential runners in the USA. Chavez is a journalist with not nearly the amount of impact and influence.

coach tj wrote:

Cain is pathetic now. She's complaining about calling the pacers muscular. She will never be competitive in this sport again so she's trying to remain relevant as an activist.

If she cares about women, she would have spoken out long ago about Caster Semenya being a man in women's races. Or she could speak out against males converting to women then dominating women's sports in high school and college. Speaking out against those things would ACTUALLY help women, but she just wants to be the politically correct police.

+1000000

Where were these women when men were destroying women in women's athletics? It was happening in high school, college, and professionally.

They were SILENT. They would call those men "brave" for competing against women. These whiners are HYPOCRITES.

I'm not going to get into whether what the announcer said was right or wrong but has anyone asked the women in the race if they were offended by this comment???

Wouldn't this be an important piece of information? What if the two women have worked on becoming more muscular and they took this as a compliment?