Alan Abrahamson is an Olympic lackey at the highest level, the Peter King of the IOC, and one doesn't get to the top of the ass-kissing heap of five-ring propagandists by not knowing how to get along. But Abrahamson went from benign sycophant to unabashed Benedict Arnold when he took to his website to decry the loss of decency in track and field in a story titled "USATF voices: a call for passion, civility, and common sense."
So let me say, on behalf of all track and field: Alan Abrahamson, fuck off.
Below is every stupid, piece-of-shit argument he made, taken apart piece by stinking piece.
Abrahamson starts his tower of horseshit by castigating track and field athletes and fans for their anger at having their voices collectively ignored when USA Track and Field's Executive Board blithely overruled a 392 to 70 vote to shoehorn its president Stephanie Hightower into the role as IAAF representative.
This produced raw emotion. Why? Sexism? Racism? Petty personality politics? Some combination of all three? Or something altogether else?
Hightower is both black and a woman. But according to Becca Gillespy Peter, the Pacific Northwest USATF Communications Chair who was present in Anaheim, voters that comprised the majority were both black and white, male and female. If there was any common denominator, they were older, she says.
"These same people voted for her (Hightower) for president," she adds, "so that argument doesn't really hold water."
The reason for athletes' and fans' "raw emotion" is because their voice was solicited, received, and then brushed aside, despite considerable personal expense to attend. It has nothing to do with Abrahamson's gender- and race-baiting thesis.
He goes on:
The intensity is all the more mystifying given USATF's fantastic financial performance and the wholesale changes underway at the IAAF level.
The problem isn't whether or not USATF is making money; the problem is that its athletes aren't seeing any of it. And as for the IAAF, with accusations of bribery and corruption leading all the way to the presidency, is that really the best example to bring up?
USATF, after years of putting the fun in dysfunctional, finally appears to be on the right track under the leadership of Hightower and chief executive Max Siegel.
Right track? You've got to be shitting me. The "right track" is not defined as having your dirty laundry aired in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. First the USA Indoors fiasco in February, then the World Relays coaches with doping pasts over the summer, and most recently its Athlete Advisory Council chair, the highest athlete voice in the room, receiving an eight-year ban for encouraging and facilitating top athletes in the use of PEDs. These were just the major news stories; there were plenty of smaller issues sprinkled in between. From a public relations standpoint, USATF's incompetence and poor decisions make it the year's number two in the list of terrible U.S. Olympic governing bodies, second only to a bunch of aquatic child-diddlers.
But here is a call for the discussion to be ramped down to levels of civility and tolerance.
You can't tell starving people to wait patiently in the bread line. The tone of the current discourse has come from years of athletes' dissatisfaction with their working conditions and a growing feeling that they have no means of recourse or reform within the system. They have tried to unionize. They have taken to social media. The reason their tone has grown worse is because nothing has changed.
Abrahamson then chastises one athlete for her use of a dirty word when speaking on the situation:
Would language like this be acceptable at any Mommy and Me class — Fleshman writing . . . "I don't know enough about Stephanie Hightower to know if she would be good at the job or not, or better than Bob, etc. But I do know that at this meeting she was full of s***, so that's not a good start."
Shut the fuck up, Abrahamson. You're not the morality police, and this isn't the 1950s.
He then criticizes an op-ed published the Orange County Register, which detailed Hightower's mistakes while working in other bureaucracies. Because a person's past experience in bureaucracy apparently has nothing to do with their current performance.
To reiterate, everyone with an interest in track and field and in USATF ought to dial down the rhetoric . . . Disagreement is fine. Cable-channel nasty name-calling is not. It needs to stop.
From start to finish, Abrahamson sounds like a substitute teacher trying to call a class to order. But his biggest finger-wag comes when he asks why athletes didn't call for the suspension of Athletes Advisory Council chair Jon Drummond when the news of his doping involvement broke in May. What Abrahamson should be asking is why USATF didn't issue a statement until December. But that might hurt his friends' feelings.
Where, now, are the voices—especially those who were in that room in Anaheim two weeks ago—who will rise up in defense of their peers, the clean athletes who in roughly 20 months will put on the red, white and blue and compete in Rio de Janeiro for the United States at the 2016 Summer Games?
THEY ARE WORKING PART-TIME JOBS SO THEY DON'T END UP HOMELESS OR ON FOODSTAMPS, YOU PIECE OF SHIT BLOVIATOR.
You want something to be passionate about? Be passionate about that.
Passion, Alan, is what all this noise is about.
Photo: David Morris/Flickr