ritzy635 wrote:
i was shocked that this wasn't a major topic of conversation as soon as the race happened.... i convinced myself i must have just been imagining how bad the elbow was.
That elbow is so deliberated and flagrant. I can't understand the apologists on this thread and some others, who make dumb comments like, oh, this is de rigueur for Track & Field and Cross Country. I am a tad sensitive to this stuff, I should say--it is controversial, but not conclusively settled, in my mind, when I view occasions in international elite 5ks where East Africans and sometimes Caucasian athletes are jostling each other, sometimes so bad that some fall off the track (e.g. Solinsky, hehe--some think this was a "joke" for his size, but I'm not discussing that here). Cheap stuff, foul play, does go on some of the time, even beyond modest elbows, unintended collisions, modest jostling and spiking.
But that Russian's behavior is unacceptable. It's as clear as daylight. Her conduct was totally unnecessary for her normal racing routine. A fairly competing and endowed athlete would simply have just continued down the line and tried to do what is basic to the sport--RUN FASTER AND RACE. She went out of her way to CLEARLY launch an ELBOW at Ajee Wilson.
If it had been me, admittedly, I would have been too surprised or shocked to react in time. Only the clarity of the race footage provoked an appropriate reaction (in the sense of eye-for-an-eye, not in the sense of productive conduct for a paid professional athlete)--when I saw that, I thought, dang, that Russian deserves to be knocked out. Of course, wouldn't be a wise idea (for an American, to boot) to do that in Moscow.
That threshold of conduct has NO place in the sport of Track & Field and distance running. That sort of conduct has nothing to do with the goals and spirit of the racing endeavour.
All these macho comparisons to unrelated sports are irrelevant. Take your machismo elsewhere, to Sport Fighting or other violent endeavours.