Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
In the land of the gods, the Acropolis towering above, Jeremy Wariner sprints into history -- and racial stereotypes vanish in a flash.
Aug 24, 2004 | I want to be Jeremy Wariner! I saw him smoke the competition in the 400 semis on Saturday night, and the dude was so cool with his mini-goat and his shades and long thoroughbred body and his impassive face, and mainly he was so damn fast, that I kept checking him out with the binoculars to see if he really was white. I know, we're not supposed to notice this, and if we do we're certainly not supposed to say anything, but ... come on. As a mongrel racial type myself who could shut down just about everybody of any color in my high school over 60 yards, I never had any truck with the idea that it's somehow indecorous or objectionable to notice that race matters in sports. The subject is so loaded in a bad way most of the time, it's nice to have a few subjects that you can just drop on the table with an innocent, loud thud.
According to the dictates of racial politeness -- as witnessed by this thread from a runner's forum -- pulling for a member of one racial group, particularly if it's your own, is evidence of racism. That may sometimes be true, but it doesn't have to be. Race isn't a zero-sum game, and the best way to restore some innocence and sanity to it is to allow there to be some places where you don't have to take it so damn seriously. So I'm all for bringing back the Great White Hope. Let a thousand pale-skinned, non-possession wide receivers blossom! You don't pull for Jeremy Wariner because you want to tear down Michael Johnson: You hope that the white kid can reach Michael's extraordinary heights. And identifying racially with a white 400 runner, or basketball player, or stud of all stud positions, cornerback, if there are any still in the NFL, is a very minor and benign form of group identification, one that doesn't preclude a deeper human identification with any great athlete of whatever race. It goes the same way with blacks crashing through barriers: At the 3-meter springboard diving yesterday (which I found strangely sleep-inducing despite the endless parade of virtuoso triple somersaults and tucks and twists), I found myself pulling for the black Brazilian diver Cesar Castro.
It isn't complicated: White people don't run fast. Not only do they not win the 400, they don't win the 200 or the 100 either. It's no secret that if you need to put the pedal to the metal, don't turn to the Caucasians. Sure, every now and then the U.S. will boycott an Olympics, or some pea-brained track coach will give his athletes the wrong starting time so that when they show up at the stadium after four years of grinding workouts, the race is already over. And when that happens, the Alan Wellses and Valerie Borzovs of the world get to have their little medals. (Oh yeah, there was also this Greek guy, Konstandinos Kenteris, who came out of nowhere in Sydney to win the 200. He's currently running faster than ever, being pursued by the Furies in an exciting, real-life production of "The Eumenides." More on him and the whole Greek drug hoo-hah in the next piece.)
But something is changing. Maybe it's just because of drug disqualifications, which knocked out the top black women sprinters. Or maybe white people are eating their spinach -- or something a little stronger. (The Olympics drug carnival, which now has reached Ionesco-like proportions, makes trying to figure out reasons for any athletic achievements futile: Any grand theory you advance is likely to be embarrassingly refuted by a cup full of pee.) Whatever the reason, in the women's 100 on Friday night, I and the rest of the crowd watched with mouth agape as a lanky Belorussian with bangs named Yuliya Nesterenko flew down the track to beat American Lauryn Williams and Jamaican Veronica Campbell for the gold. For skeptics wondering how the sleeper Nesterenko managed to win, let it be noted that she offered the following homely explanation: "First of all, we finally got our own apartment, me and my husband. Before we used to live with my parents and it wasn't comfortable." The Eastern bloc countries have apparently come a long way from the days when state apparatchiks doled out dachas, cars and steroids to a chosen race of superhuman hermaphrodites.
