The Race Blindness of Sha'Carri Richardson
Is race really the "only difference" in Olympic doping controversy?
By HanaLyn Colvin – February 18, 2022
If the color of her skin is the “only difference” track and field sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson can see between herself and Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva, then she needs to have her eyesight checked.
On Monday the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Russian skater Kamila Valieva had been cleared to continue competing in the individual women’s figure skating events at the Beijing Olympics despite testing positive for a banned substance in December.
Valieva submitted her test sample to a lab in Sweden last December, but the failed results weren’t revealed until last week, after Valieva had already led the Russians to a gold medal in the team skating competition.
The decision to allow Valieva to finish competing drew an indignant reproach from American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson, who was barred from competing in the Tokyo Olympics last summer after testing positive for marijuana. Richardson tweeted, “The only difference I see is that I’m a black young lady.”
Can we get a solid answer on the difference of her situation and mines? My mother died and I can’t run and was also favored to place top 3. The only difference I see is I’m a black young lady. https://t.co/JtUfmp3F8L
— Sha’Carri Richardson (@itsshacarri) February 14, 2022
RACE HUSTLERS quickly took the bait, churning out headlines dripping with Jim Crow-era racial hostility.
“Funny how the little white girl who skates got treated differently than the fast Black girl who sprints,” DEADSPIN opined.
Funny, indeed.
Regardless of whether anyone thinks the decision to let Valieva compete is valid or fair, it very clearly has nothing to do with the difference in skin tone between the two athletes.
Yes, Richardson is black and Valieva is white. Valieva is also Russian and a minor, and her suspension has followed a completely different trajectory than Richardson’s. By superficially conflating two entirely distinct situations, Richardson reveals either an ignorance of the details of the two cases or a blind refusal to acknowledge the real differences.
Let’s review the details of the two cases at hand.
The suspensions were handed down by two completely separate governing bodies. Richardson was suspended during the U.S. Olympic trials for testing positive for THC at the time she was competing. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency issued the decision. She was suspended for the minimum amount of time required by anti-doping regulations. Richardson received the same punishment that two other athletes received from the same agency.
The suspension prevented her from competing in the individual competitions in Tokyo, but would not have prevented her from competing in the team relay, scheduled for after her 30-day suspension was lifted. That is, if she had been selected to participate by U.S. Track and Field officials. She was not selected to compete.
Valieva was also suspended once her December test results revealed that she had tested positive for trace amounts of trimetazidine, a heart medication that can increase endurance. Her provisional suspension was then lifted by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency.
The Russian Anti-Doping Agency lifted a ban against a Russian athlete. To say this was based on her skin color is absurd. It assumes that Russia would have also banned Richardson if she were competing as a Russian athlete, and conversely that the U.S. would have permitted Valieva to compete if she had failed a drug test in the States.
The difference comes down, not to race, but to the way two sovereign countries enforce Olympic doping regulations. Russia has a sordid history of playing dirty when it comes to doping athletes. This has nothing to do with Richardson at all and everything to do with Russia’s well-known history of corruption and old-fashioned national chauvinism.
The IOC didn’t blithely accept this reversal by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency. It appealed the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). It was the CAS that ultimately ruled that Valieva be allowed to compete, citing the “untenable delay” at the testing facility that held up the results until after the Olympic games were already well underway, and also the young skater’s age.
Valieva is a minor, only 15 years old. Questions of how trace amounts of the banned medication got into her system or whether she was even aware that she consumed the drug remain unresolved.
As a minor, Valieva is considered a “protected person” under anti-doping rules, and if she is found guilty of doping, her adult coaches, trainers, and medical staff would face stricter punishment than she would.
Richardson, by contrast, is a 21-year-old adult who made the conscious decision to smoke marijuana, fully aware at the time that she was violating anti-doping regulations.
Furthermore, the IOC refused to hold a medal ceremony for any event in which Valieva placed in the top three, unwilling to award her a medal that might have to be revoked pending the final outcome of her doping case.
As it turns out, the matter resolved itself. Valieva’s hopes for Olympic gold ended in a crushing defeat, as she stumbled and fell on the ice during her individual competition and finished in fourth place.
Richardson’s track career suffered a similar ignominious fate. After trolling the Jamaican Olympic track champions on social media, Richardson failed to best any of them in person when she competed in her first race after the Tokyo Olympic games were over. In fact, she failed to beat anyone. Richardson finished last at the Prefontaine Classic in Oregon.
There has been an almost unanimous outcry against the CAS verdict to allow Valieva to compete. Other skaters and coaches denounced the unfairness of the decision, especially when it threatened to postpone the medal ceremony for all competitors. There simply is no chorus of voices supporting Valieva because she is white.
Nor was there any outcry from fellow track and field athletes denouncing Richardson’s suspension as unfair because she is black. Eight-time Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt cautioned that Richardson needed good people around her to explain to her that “rules are rules” and “they’re in place for a reason.” He advised her to talk less and “train more” if she wanted to truly be successful in the sport.
Nor did the three Jamaican sprinters who swept the women’s 100-meter race in the Tokyo Olympics offer any excuses for Richardson because of her race.
Indeed, Richardson’s complaint that racism kept her out of the Olympics does nothing except ignore and insult the phenomenal accomplishments of Elaine Thompson-Herah, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, and Shericka Jackson, all of whom are black women — none of whom allowed poor personal choices to keep them from realizing their Olympic goals.
Richardson herself certainly didn’t demonstrate any sense of racial solidarity with the victorious Jamaican athletes as she was busy on social media liking posts that compared silver medalist Fraser-Pryce to Lil Wayne and dismissed Jamaicans as backwoods hicks that “gotta walk barefoot to [their] coconut stand everyday for a living.”
Tweets like that would have been furiously denounced as racist if any white person had posted them.
Richardson’s own accusations of racism fall short of any honest scrutiny of the facts. Every detail refutes her claim that she was treated differently because she’s black.
The claim is just chum in the water for RACE HUSTLERS and IDENTITARIANS who feed off tribal resentments. But so long as Richardson continues to frame every issue through the lens of American race politics, she will miss seeing a clear picture of the reality before her. Her insistence on only seeing race leaves her blind to seeing anything else.
It’s time for Richardson to get a new pair of glasses.
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For more on this topic, watch HanaLyn’s premiere episode where she tackles the contentious issue of social justice segregation and asks do we want to be a nation of separate ethnostates or one nation indivisible?