For more than nine years, since Max Siegel became chief executive of USA Track & Field, this space has pleaded for civility, dignity and respect in the way people in and around the sport talk to and with each other.
Too often — far too often — the rhetoric is otherwise. It has proven not just unconstructive but inflammatory.
Siegel, along with chief operating officer Renee Washington, are the only two Black executives in the U.S. Olympic landscape.
USATF chief executive Max Siegel
After all these years, it’s difficult if not impossible to believe there is not a racial — if not racist — undertone to the criticism. Because the substance if not the tone almost immediately turns angry and destructive, as it has in the latest crisis to beset American track and field, the doping ban handed U.S. middle-distance standout Shelby Houlihan, adjudged liable by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport after testing positive for impermissible levels of the anabolic steroid nandrolone.
The level of criticism that was directed Thursday at USATF — and by extension at Siegel and Washington — and particularly on Twitter, and in particular from people who absolutely should know better, is inexcusable.
USATF chief operating officer Renee Washington
Again: inexcusable.
Under what circumstances does Des Linden, the 2018 Boston Marathon winner and a two-time U.S. Olympian, believe it is OK to take to Twitter to proclaim, as she did in response to a story on ESPN that Houlihan’s name — while USATF was waiting Thursday on appropriate formal notice from the Athletics Integrity Unit that Houlihan had, in fact, been banned — was tentatively on Friday’s start lists:
“What the actual fuck?”
Would Linden walk right up to Siegel or Washington and say that in person? If not, why not? Did anyone teach her manners?
From the safety of a computer screen, it’s OK to be rude? Who says?
Aren’t athletes supposed to be role models? Isn’t that why, say, Brooks is endorsing her? “Like dogs? Love music? Des’ social media is filled with both, making us happy on a daily basis,” it says on the Brooks page devoted to Linden. Really? WTF?
How about Mary Wittenberg, the sports executive who for years led the New York Road Runners, which puts on the New York Marathon? She, too, took to Twitter to assert that no way should Houlihan be allowed to run on Friday.
This is the way to do business? You don’t pick up the phone and call people with whom you’ve had a longstanding relationship and ask quietly and collegially, maybe even offering to help or even just to listen if that might be appropriate, what’s up? Instead, you call them out on Twitter? For what purpose? To make yourself look good and them — bad? Why?
Then, to reiterate, there is the post that Wittenberg cited. It’s from an entity called the Clean Sport Collective, and purports to be an “open letter” signed by the “running community.” Before getting into the meat of the letter itself, it’s worth reviewing the list of names because in there are those — you know who you are — who asked Siegel and Washington for Trials-related favors, which were well-considered. Nonetheless, they’re on that list.
Inexcusable.
You’re ripping on USATF — and Siegel and Washington — and hiding, right there in plain sight.
Inexcusable.
There’s the athlete who asked for special consideration for a credential.
The athlete who asked for special help with an outside business project.
It boggles the mind, really.
The problem with this letter from the collective is that, like many things on social media, it doesn’t have all the facts and was entirely premature.
Further, it was the action of a mob. No one — not one person — took individual responsibility for anything.
Not one person was willing to stand up by herself or himself and say, what Shelby Houlihan did was wrong, and I condemn her for testing positive.
Because that’s the problem, not USATF.
This letter represents the farthest thing from courage.
It’s cowardice.
And each and all of you who signed it know it — you know it in your hearts.
“We, a group of athletes committed to promoting and competing in a clean sport, are saddened and angered by the decision of USATF to allow an athlete who has been convicted of testing positive for Nandrolone to compete at this year’s Olympic Trials,” it begins.
This is like high school, where the cool kids — or the kids who think they’re the cool kids — get together to write an email without bothering to check the facts. This attitude is then exacerbated by the hashtag #cleanUSATF — a hashtag that betrays a fundamental understanding of virtually everything except the way social media works, which in this instance is to play to the worst, most base instincts of the mob.
And for what purpose?
USATF was never going to “allow” anything of the sort.
Before writing and circulating for signatures, did the drafter or drafters of this letter bother to do the decent, respectful, civil thing and call the USATF office? Did they go through the AAC and ask what was what? Or did they just lash out?
Process may not be sexy. But much in big-time sport involves process. And doping matters involve layers of process. If you truly are committed to “promoting and competing in a clean sport,” you’d best understand process.
And relationships.
For context:
If they were in Shelby Houlihan’s position, and this is 110 percent guaranteed, any of the signers to that letter would want Siegel, Washington and USATF to do exactly what they did Thursday. The two executives and the organization were protecting her rights, and the organization’s, while they waited for process to play out.
Instead of reacting emotionally, consider — calmly — the situation. Put yourself in Siegel or Washington’s shoes, charged with being the stewards of the organization:
Of course, they “knew” about Houlihan’s ban. They had read or heard about it like everyone else. In lawyer and sports management terms, though, this is what’s called constructive notice. This is not good enough. What they needed is what’s called actual notice. That is, they needed formal notice from the Athletics Integrity Unit that Houlihan had been handed the four-year ban that everyone knew about.
This put USATF in a bind.
As is by now well-known, the heats for the women’s 1500 and 5000 are due to be run Friday at Hayward Field in Eugene. Without formal notice from AIU, USATF faced the threat of Houlihan asserting that she was being denied the right to compete — which undoubtedly might lead not just to complication but to litigation.
What USATF, Siegel and Washington did Thursday amounted to the very essence of due process; that is, Houlihan was entitled to every bit of the process due her; and the two executives and USATF made sure she got it. And if any of the signers to that letter were in the same situation, they would want the same.
Despite the whining and bitching all around. Which, from a group of people who were massively uninformed, is entirely inappropriate.
Which of course makes you wonder — or not really — why so much vocal whining and bitching.
All the same, as Siegel and Washington have made plain time and again over the nine years they have been in charge, anyone and everyone is entitled to a fair shake and due process in the U.S. track and field landscape.
As he said Thursday in a phone interview, speaking generally, “We always advocate for a fair process regardless of who it is. We advocate for a reasonable sanction regardless of the outcome of a particular case.”
The New York Times’ Tariq Panja — typically an excellent newsman — missed it on Thursday when he quoted a World Athletics as saying the federation was “unhappy” with USATF over Houlihan being listed on the start lists: “All Member Federations must respect CAS decisions under the WADA code. We are talking to USATF.”
It’s true that USATF and WA were talking. The unhappy party was USATF. Someone — Panja, maybe? — ought to go back and ask WA chief executive Jon Ridgeon how many calls he and Siegel had in which Siegel said, where is the formal notice from AIU?
Finally, at 3:25 p.m. Pacific Thursday — meaning 12:25 a.m. Friday in Monaco — AIU sent via email the formal notice to USATF. At that point, Houlihan’s name was, appropriately, taken off the start lists.
Houlihan, in postings widely distributed Friday morning across social media, disclosed that — as expected — the Swiss Federal Tribunal had denied her appeal from the four-year CAS ban because, precisely as this space had explained in a column Thursday, CAS has not published a decision. She also said: “I want to be clear that, contrary to media reports, I never had any intention of competing if this injunction wasn’t granted.”
But by Thursday afternoon, of course, all the screaming on social media had taken on a life of its own.
Take a look anew at that list of names. A few, for sure, are Black. But overwhelmingly that list is white and middle- to upper-class.
That list reeks of white privilege.
The people on that list sent that letter — unequivocally intending to create a social media firestorm and blowback against Siegel, Washington and USATF — amid a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 people, disproportionately people of color; as this country is wrestling with issues of racial and social justice in the year after the murder of George Floyd; directed at the one entity in American sport directed by two Black executives; at the one entity with a board of directors where people of color make up a significant majority.
Where is civility, decency, tolerance?
You want to be “saddened” and “angered”? Take out that ire — in a respectful way, please — at Shelby Houlihan.
Shelby Houlihan is the one who tested positive for nandrolone. She and her veteran coach, Jerry Schumacher, are the ones who implausibly said they had never heard of the substance. She is the one who said she ingested pork offal at an “authentic” Mexican food truck even though her lawyer, Paul Greene, said she ordered a carne asada — steak — burrito, which leaves the question of how pork levels high enough to cause a positive test for a banned anabolic steroid could have gotten into a steak burrito.
The Clean Sport Collective noted in a tweet earlier this week that Shelby Houlihan never signed its pledge to “always train clean, compete clean and live clean.”
Maybe one or more of you signers ought to have the courage to confront her, peaceably, and ask why.
And give Max Siegel and Renee Washington the respect they deserve.