#104: Not here to play 'nice'

As everyone hikes up their big girl pants and braces for the big races.

issue #104: Sept. 11, 2024

Well, all you all-sporters, I’m watching this bizarre Presidential debate right now while writing this — so not totally sure how this newsletter will turn out (!). We’ll see what happens.

We did, however, finish our preliminary plans for Women’s Nice for next week and our Feisty schedule of events. You can RSVP for the underwater photo shoot and come by our pop-up across from the beach at the swim start. (Look for the Feisty banner.)

We’ll have these cool Nice shirts for sale:

I also opened up our yearly predictions contest in which you can win a random assortment of prizes. Who doesn’t want that? Get your picks in:

Who will win Women's Nice?

Now onto the non-Nice news.

- Kelly

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A whole bunch of races I hadn’t paid any attention to until now

I didn’t have any *big* races on the calendar of big races for this past weekend — so I was then curious why and how I got sucked into random events in Samarkand (and Googling ‘where is Samarkand’) and Beijing and Gérardmer?

Turns out a lot of big-name athletes looked to fill their calendars out and find tune-up races ahead of T100 Ibiza or the IM World Champs — and they either signed some nice appearance contracts with some smaller RDs or they picked some interesting flesh-out events.

Challenge Samarkand: (It’s in Uzbekistan, fyi.) Normally, I’d be underwhelmed by Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden going 1-2 at some race I’d never heard of. Like, sure, we’re all rooting for Gustav to get back to form, but they should win. Except, they also beat defending 70.3 World Champ Rico Bogen and ran him down, so that’s not nothing.

Challenge Beijing: It appears this was (sorta) the newest iteration of the old Beijing International Tri. And it was invite-only with six pro women and six men. And it had a $100K prize purse. So, you know, they really should have done a better job promoting it…

Kyle Smith juuuust beat out Marc Dubrick and Henri Schoemann. And Paula Findlay won, ahead of then heading to the UCI World Championshipss to rep Canada in the TT next weekend.

Triathlon de Gérardmer XL: And, evidently, Ashleigh Gentle went to a lake in northeast France to tune-up for Ibiza. She broke the course record but only got second. I find, however, she always comes around just at the right time, don’t you.

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Rest of the best of the results

• World Triathlon World Cup - Karlovy Vary: American up-and-comer John Reed won, which I think was good news for all the people paying a lot of attention to the U.S. development pipeline. And Maya Kingma was dominant in the women’s race.

  • Both are available on Youtube btw, as is this weekend’s upcoming World Cup in Valencia.

• Supertri London: Both Georgia TB and Hayden Wilde won again. You know how it feels half like luck when the races are so fast and so short, but somehow the same people manage to pull it off time and again. There’s something they’re good at in there that makes it more than luck.

Results: Challenge Samarkand, Challenge Beijing, Sunshine Coast 70.3, World Cup - Karlovy Vary, Supertri London

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Who gets to be on age-group teams?

Now, to follow-up on what I wrote last year about one age-group women’s squad kicking a trans woman off their team after an open ‘everyone welcome’ application process: That squad, Betty Designs, has now made that policy official for this year — it’s at the bottom of their team application page and Betty’s founder confirmed to me the squad is “open exclusively to biological women.”

An aside: “Biological women” is not a real scientific term. It is not a term any scientific expert or biologist would use, because it doesn’t mean anything specific and scientists are nothing if not pedantic. “Biological women” has no scientific definition, because there is too much natural variation and unique-ness in the biological world. So we won’t continue to use the term because it implies some things between the lines without saying them — and let’s say what we mean.

This Betty policy was made public over the last week in a number of upset third-party Instagram and Facebook posts, and I gather Betty then got a lot of backlash and had to turn off comments and delete some of their own posts on social media.

I will also say that Betty founder, Kristin, wanted to clarify to me that the goal was to promote fairness and “the goal is not to discriminate against anyone.”

Here’s the problem though. Whether or not the goal is discrimination, when a sub-group of people is specifically excluded on the basis of their identity that is what discrimination is. By definition. And, I’d also argue that every gatekeeper in history has come up with other reasons for their gatekeeping. Like, historically speaking, when Black people were excluded from swimming pools the people doing the excluding literally said it wasn’t because they were against Black people, Black people could have their own pools, it was just for sanitary and hygienic reasons, and anyway it’s better for people to be with their own kind for fairness and for safety.

That logic didn’t age super well then, either.

I understand how we got here. I understand that this question of whether trans women can compete in women’s sports—which was once only the concern of a small group of people who spent a lot of time thinking about it, in a mostly theoretical sense, because it simply isn’t a frequent enough issue—has now become a political weapon. But let’s acknowledge that whatever concerns we might have about hashing out the details of inclusion protocols at an Olympic-level should not and can not be adjudicated by age-group triathlon squads.

The whole point of age-group triathlon squads originally is simply to sell gear. First and foremost, they were created primarily to use the members as early influencer marketers. Secondarily, to give those (typically female) age-groupers other athletes to talk to and a sense of community. But mostly to sell gear.

These are not paragons of fairness or scientific nuance. So, I’d argue, you can sell trans women gear and you can answer their Facebook group questions about setting up transition and you can train with them and create community with them. It’ll age better in the long run.

READ: “Who Gets to Play in Women’s Leagues?”

READ: “New Study Bolsters Idea of Differences Between Men and Trans Women”

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The -ish

Stuff from around our sports worth knowing about this week.

• Jonas Deichmann finished his 120 days in a row of covering the Ironman distance every day. Which raises the question: What do you think the limit on the number of days is? (Tri247)

• And how does a fire burning down your garage/pain cave affect your Kona prep? Guess we’re going to find out because that’s what happened to Sam Laidlow. (Instagram)

• Ironman’s content team also spent last year shooting and putting together a ‘Drive to Survive’-style series following five different athletes through their 2023 season. It comes out tomorrow on their Youtube — and, fyi, I worked on one of the scripts! (Instagram/Youtube)

• T100 also put up a two-part mini-doc on the race series so far: the race for the title. (Youtube)

• The Paralympics are wrapped up now and they were fascinating. With so much more attention — more viewers, more coverage, more tickets — some issues that have always simmered in the background have now come into the spotlight. But also: The 4x100m Universal Relay is absolutely something. (It requires two men & two women; one visually impaired runner, one amputee, one athlete with cerebral palsy or similar impairment, and a wheelchair athlete. Wild.) (Washington Post/Instagram/Youtube)

• Other fascinating thing this week (and by fascinating I mean hilarious): The Mondo Duplantis v. Karsten Warholm 100m showdown. (Youtube)

• Sydney McLaughlin, one of the most popular track athletes in the world, wasn’t going to be allowed to race in the Diamond League final because she hadn’t done any Diamond League races this year — so they made a special race just for her. (Citius Mag)

• Five athletes have now been DQ’d for doping from the 2012 Olympic 1500m final. Which is a lot of people from one final. And that means that Shannon Rowbury, who was originally 6th, could now get the bronze. (NBC)

• Powerman Zofigen will host the World Triathlon Long Distance Duathlon World Championship for 2025-26. It also hosted the duathlon world championship this past weekend, in case you were wondering. (Facebook)

• Canadian triathlon icon and race organizer, Michael Brown, died suddenly last week. (Triathlon Magazine)

• A runner also died at the finish of the Disney Half-Marathon in L.A. (Los Angeles Times)

• I was served an ad on Facebook the other day looking for claimants who might have participated in the Tough Mudder in Sonoma last year that led to an outbreak of infections. So, apparently, there’s a class action gonna be filed soon. (KQED)

• Wave1 Performance, which is one of the only places that does regular coverage of NCAA racing and athletes, launched a series of Instagram posts and videos over the weekend that started by “outing” some of the collegiate coaches who are problematic — but then just got more and more. More is really the only word I have. (Not that I think he’s wrong that there’s an “old-school-ness” to some of the institutions and coaches who came from even older systems and institutions, and there desperately needs to be an updating of their mental manuals. I just think some of the college athletes are starting to feel really uncomfortable now too and could use a slowdown.) (Instagram)

• The Cyclists’ Alliance released its annual survey of female pro riders. (TCA)

• Here are the long-course prize money earnings so far this year. (Daily Tri)

• Alex Morgan announced her retirement and played her last game and got all the platforms to coordinate to air it (all in a short four-day span). As I was saying to my husband: She’s always been bitchier and more interesting than she was originally given credit for. She took the power and opportunity she had and actually used it to help change so many things. I’m gonna claim that as a win for Cal Bears. (Youtube/PowerPlays)

• Apparently, in the universe of FKTs, there were a bunch of big ones captured this week. I gather that included some crazy 16-day, 82-peak thing Killian Jornet did. (Twitter/Strava)

• If you’ve had a concussion — and you probably have — you’ll find interesting our new four-part series following Rebecca Rusch’s recovery from her “mild” concussion and what can be learned from the experts. (Apple Podcast)

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One last thing

Here’s how the AP photographer shot the Olympic triathlon.