Opinion: Marathon Man -- Running Off at the Mouth
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What year is this again? What city?
The Los Angeles Marathon gimmicked Sunday’s race to get a more thrilling finish. The 20-minute head start for women runners gave the victory and a six-figure bonus to the winner, the Russian woman who broke the tape.
Tatiana Aryasova’s overall time was two hours, 29 minutes and 9 seconds, compared to Laban Moiben of Kenya’s two hours, 13 minutes and 50 seconds.
The Marathon’s co-founder and president, William Burke, was so wowed by Aryasova’s performance that he marveled to Channel 4, ‘You can’t keep those women down. You can’t get them back in the kitchen.’
So –- to answer my questions, the year must be 1950, and the town must be Stepford.
My colleague Helene Elliott reported that Burke offered ‘no smile or wink to indicate he was attempting to make a joke. Not even a forced chuckle.’
His knuckle-headed remark is all the more distasteful because his wife is the formidable Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the first woman and the first African-American on the Los Angeles County board of supervisors -– and the first African-American woman to go to Congress from California.
I hope she gave him a piece of her mind when he came home after Sunday’s marathon – because he sure sounded like he had come up a few brain cells short.
Burke didn’t corner the market on boneheaded blather. Two TV commentators evidently spent some time discussing whether Aryasova’s hormone levels were back to normal after childbirth. Her child was born more than two years ago. And someone left a voice mail message on Elliott’s phone suggesting she go back to the kitchen, and that ‘biology is destiny.’
Absolutely right -- obviously you just can’t defeat those ‘dopey’ genes.
Can you imagine the hue and cry if Burke had made some equivalently dumb, stereotypical remark about the first black marathoner to turn in a winning performance?
Oh, what’s that? You don’t think he would have said any such thing?
Well, there’s the problem, right there.