EUGENE, Ore. — That didn’t take long. All too predictably.
Not even 24 hours after Sha’Carri Richardson sped to victory in the women’s 100 meters here Sunday night at the U.S. Olympic Trials, a British journalist posted to Twitter a note about Richardson’s coach, Dennis Mitchell.
In this tweet, this correspondent pointed out that it had been he in 1998 who had “exclusively” reported that Mitchell had been “let off a doping charge for excessive testosterone, which he claimed was down to drinking beer and having sex four times a day with his wife. ‘It was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat.’“
This note underscores the racial — if not racist — reckoning that track and field must confront. In the year after the murder of George Floyd, this tweet spotlights the undercurrents of the very thing that the British sprint champion Dina Asher-Smith so eloquently wrote about in a brilliant column published last summer in The Telegraph — the “layers and layers of ‘unconscious’ bias at best, and hate at worst, that affect [her] life on a day-to-day basis.”
Sha’Carri Richardson, winner of the women’s 100 at the US Olympic Trials // Getty Images
It is 100 percent the case that track and field is the most diverse sport in the Olympic landscape. This is without question.
It is also beyond dispute that track and field’s governing body, World Athletics, has made major strides toward advancement in gender equity, particularly in its governance structure, which by 2027 will see women in a 50-50 role in its policy-making council, executive board and commissions.
But, as WA president Seb Coe said in a roundtable interview Sunday with a handful of American reporters, when asked about issues of race in the sport, “I think we have come a long way. But we have a distance still to travel.”
For instance, to quote from the Asher-Smith column, which won the Best Column award this year from AIPS, the international sportswriters’ association, but was not widely read in the United States, this is how what needs to be confronted plays itself out:
“In sport, it is hearing that a journalist at our World Championships holding camp press day only asked the black male athletes if they had ever been in a gang, had ever seen someone get stabbed and other harmful racial tropes, clearly looking to put the story on to the athlete before the athlete had the chance to show who they were themselves. It’s hearing the term ‘the Africans’ used to lazily collectively describe athletes in the distance races – why not use their actual names? – and then seeing debates that the races are hard to follow and not always appealing to a European audience because everyone ‘looks the same.’”
Earlier in the story, she offered other examples of day-to-day life:
“It’s being assumed that I am an employee rather than an attendee at a black-tie event. It’s being assumed that I come from a single-parent household and having consistently to emphasize that yes, my father is present and does come to my races… yes he’s over there… and yes, he is loving and supportive, he has been since the day I was born. It’s having to smile through the shocked “Oh” that follows that. It’s being followed around not so inconspicuously by security in a store from the moment you step in. It’s being assumed you can’t afford to buy anything in a nice shop.
“It’s turning up for a photo shoot and being told your hair was too ‘Bronx’ in cornrows, so it had to be completely restyled. It’s having my skin tone lightened in post-production after a shoot had concluded, to such an extent that when I saw the final images I went and looked in the mirror to confirm that I wasn’t imagining things.
“It’s as a dark-skinned black woman having to undergo the common journey of learning to love your hair the way it grows out of your head and your skin tone in your early twenties as you had grown up with images and the paradigm of beauty as the exact opposite to what you were and messages specifically telling you that in real life exchanges, in music lyrics and from even the dolls you played with at a young age.”
The story of Dennis Mitchell — and Sha’Carri Richardson — and, by extension, her training partners, Javianne Oliver and Justin Gatlin, offer yet more evidence for the ways in which these biases play out. Oliver finished second in Sunday’s women’s 100 and is also Tokyo-bound.
The story that the British writer referenced on Twitter is 23 years old. Dennis Mitchell is remarried. He and his wife have a young child. Sha’Carri Richardson was not even alive — she was born in March 2000 — and so the point of referencing this story in connection with Richardson is, what exactly?
In a follow-up tweet, the writer doubled down. He said it’s one of track and field’s “biggest PR problems” because “too many athletes - particularly sprinters - who fail drug tests are then allowed [to] come back and start coaching the next generation. It inevitably leaves a cloak of suspicion on whoever they are coaching”
The only “cloak of suspicion” is the one fabricated by reporters trying to draw links that aren’t there. There is an enormous difference between correlation and causation. Which leaves only one possible explanation for what’s what.
It’s not, by the way, as if the 1998 story — especially the salacious parts — represents some novelty that appears on Twitter. It’s a recurring trope in the British press. Last month, when Richardson raced in England, here it was in the Daily Mail; again in the Guardian and The Times.
This disturbing groupthink offers irrefutable evidence — to use Asher-Smith’s presentation — of bias, unconscious or worse.
Courtesy of the website Run Blog Run, this, word for word, here is what Richardson said at the news conference that collectively prompted these writers to bring up the 1998 beer-and-sex story, and see if there is legitimately any reason — any reason whatsoever — to bring up those details except to trash Mitchell for something that happened before Richardson was born:
"We had a conversation before he started training me and he was transparent with me. I know from the relationship we have that he will never put me in a position to be in something like that. Y'all don't have to worry about any doping situations. What we do in training is through the roof. I would back my coach, Dennis Mitchell, 100%, 1000%. We were very transparent with each other I know I will never be in that situation. I trust him 100%. And I'm a very transparent person when it comes to my athletic abilities. And I know my training. People who ask the questions don't know what goes on in my training. They just believe what they read on the internet. So I'm not worried about my reputation. I know what I do and what I need to do and I know that these men [Mitchell and Justin Gatlin] will never put me in a position that I need to worry about my reputation. If anything, they make me more mindful to be aware of my reputation myself.”
Justin Gatlin in tears talking to the media after Sunday’s 100-meter final
Further, to bring up this 1998 matter within 24 hours of Richardson’s victory on Saturday borders on the obscene. It dehumanizes both Richardson and Mitchell. It makes them objects of scorn and suspicion rather than what the moment demands — a recognition of both at a moment of victory.
Context — and empathy — now, especially, are more important than ever.
Over the last 18 months, the pandemic has claimed more than 600,000 lives in the United States alone, a disproportionate number of them people of color; the same disproportionate impact took place in the United Kingdom. The Olympic movement, at its best, serves to celebrate humanity, to remind us that each of us is more alike than different. To do so, though, we have to focus on that second word.
Humanity.
If Dennis Mitchell had done something within the past 23 years to merit a newsworthy attack, that might be something. But to keep dragging this up so that British — or other — readers can have the guilty pleasure of laughing at this story, time and again, is completely dehumanizing. It’s racist. Plain and simple.
It’s as if he keeps getting put on display for the benefit of a journalistic laugh-track — and if the word “display” here makes you uncomfortable, it should — and, after 23 years in Mitchell’s case, for no defensible reason.
Where’s the context? Any shred of empathy?
Because the contrast could not be more profound with this tweet — as was widely reported, Richardson, the very same 21-year-old that Mitchell is coaching, told reporters after the race that her biological mother had died last week. “I’m highly blessed and grateful,” she said. “My family is my everything. My everything until the day I’m done.”
Shortly after finishing the race, Richardson had made a beeline to climb halfway up the stands here at Hayward Field and give a huge hug to her grandmother, Betty Harp. Later, Richardson would explain that her grandmother was her rock, and that without her “there would be no Sha’Carri Richardson.”
A quick check of Richardson’s Instagram account would reveal she is hardly some one-dimensional figure. Check out, for instance, the picture that declares, “This is why we must vote, for our [ancestors’] justice.” Another one says, “I am more than an athlete.”
What Richardson is, is herself. Her orange hair — she changes colors frequently — was, she said, “loud and encouraging and, honestly, dangerous.” Let’s be honest. She used that word on purpose. She knows, as a young Black woman, the import of that word when she says it.
But what’s to be scared of? She has made clear in every regard her respect for her competitors and the sport. “If you’re going to go out there and be the best, you have to look the best,” she also said.
After she won the race, she — along with Oliver and third-place finisher Teahna Daniels, all Olympic rookies — made a slow circle of the track, stopping trackside for anyone and everyone who wanted to chat or take selfies. They were warm and gracious and the best of America — just like their families, communities and coaches would expect.
“That’s my little M&M,” Gatlin said of Richardson. “Very hard on the outside but a big, old, soft teddy bear on the inside.”
For those who remember, Mitchell and Gatlin were ambushed by a British newspaper team that traveled to Florida in 2017; that sorry situation ended with the middle man, agent Robert Wagner, who was looking to secure a $250,000 contract, banned for two years. As an Athletics Integrity Unit statement reads, “Mr. Wagner confirmed that he had no further information or any evidence to corroborate his claims that Mr. Justin Gatlin was doping at certain points in the season or that Mr. Dennis Mitchell was involved, aware and engaged in doping Mr. Gatlin.”
Again, the undercurrent of that entire episode is elemental: the newspaper reporters viewed Mitchell and Gatlin not as people but as targets to be taken down, as objects of derision.
And why?
It’s obvious.
All Mitchell has done in his professional coaching career is keep his head down and do the right thing. Not only that, he testified in federal court against Trevor Graham.
Gatlin, perhaps more than anyone in track and field over the past two decades, has been villainized to an extent that defies explanation. Except, again, for the one that’s at issue in this column.
No matter how much the circumstances of the two doping-related matters he has endured are explained with calm logic — the first, for instance, was for a prescription ADD medicine — the critics remain not just unmoved but almost viciously unmoored.
And you wonder why?
Gatlin comes from an extraordinary family. His father, Willie, served for 20 years in the U.S. military, and is a Vietnam vet. Recently married, Justin Gatlin is the father — for a second time — of a son, now six months old. His agent is Renaldo Nehemiah, himself one of the all-time hurdle greats. You really have to ask if Nehemiah, a man of strong faith, would be on board with a cheater. The answer is a resounding no.
When Gatlin was introduced Sunday evening to the knowledgeable crowd here at Hayward, it was only to cheers. No boos. He pulled up about halfway through the finals holding his left hamstring, which he would say later he had tweaked in the semis. All the same, he crossed in 10.87. Trayvon Bromell won in 9.8, Ronnie Baker took second in 9.85, Fred Kerley third in 9.86; Baker and Kerley ran personal bests, Kerley winning his gamble to drop down from the 400.
At 39, Justin Gatlin knew he had run his last Olympic Trials race. He tried to hold back tears talking to reporters. He could not. At one point, he put down his headphones, walked away, regained his composure and came back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, though there was no need to apologize for anything.
“One thing you all have to realize is not just myself but any athlete across the board — we put our heart, our blood, sweat and tears into this moment. Some of them last for three jumps; three throws. Some of them last for nine seconds. Some of them last for two laps. But you have to realize that the performance we all put out there as athletes is our heart. You never realize as an athlete that there’s going to be an end until —the end.”
He also said, “It’s a very rare opportunity that you are witnessing something you are going to do for the last time while you are doing it. It made me sad. But it made me happy to be here to be able to do it.”
And: “I would like to have put out a better performance, especially on Father’s Day, for my kids, my father and my father’s father. But at the same time, I’m glad to have had the career I’ve had.”
The rest of you should recognize that, too.
And if you don’t, if you’re still dogmatic or didactic about the past, maybe you should consider anew everything that’s happened all around us this last year, and ask yourself, why?
If you’re still having trouble answering, check your privilege.