It's almost like the people doing the work are products to be exploited

Nike surrendered. Dropping their lawsuit against Boris Berian was less a voluntary action and more an act of self-preservation. For those not following the case, Berian had a contract with short-term contract with Nike that allowed them to match offers if Boris found a better deal when the contract ended. Berian signed with New Balance for $125,000 after the Nike contract expired. Nike said they matched the offer - except theirs had 'reduction' clauses. 

The reduction clauses triggered mass mockery from athletes in the social media. Effectively, Nike wanted to match with as little as fifty cents on the dollar, with the argument that this was industry standard. Numerous individuals - led by Jesse Williams, Nick Symmonds, and Sally Bergesenn,the Oiselle CEO - filed briefs in support of Berian that stated that the reduction clauses were not standard. Bergesen, in her brief, stated unequivocally, "In my experience, in talking with other sponsors and industry leaders, reductions, as well as option years, are viewed as being abusive to athletes."

Exactly!

The speculation was that Nike retreated due to the skepticism shown by the presiding judge, but don't under-estimate the PR debacle that was growing. Nike has not enjoyed a good couple of years, what with the bribery scandal in Kenya, the questions regarding PED's and the Nike Oregon Project, the 'buying' of the USATF, and the unusual no-bid award of the World Championships to Eugene. The hits, as they say, keep coming. The news that Nike might just consider the athletes to be disposable products certainly would not help their image.

It also reminds me of the way that the publishing houses treat authors. Kris Rusch does a fantastic job of educating new authors to the dangers of dealing with publishing houses. Instead of reduction clauses, they co-opt (steal) as many rights as they can, place restrictions on what an author can write through non-compete clauses, and use sliding-scale royalty clauses that ensure that they always get paid for their work while reducing the author absorbs the entirety of price reductions for deeply discounted books at Costco and Walmart. 

Or Disney bringing in H1B visa-holders to replace their existing engineering staff. Adding insult to injury, Disney required the soon-to-be-laid-off engineers to train they're replacements. The abuse of the H1B program is rampant at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the rest of the tech companies.

All this points to a larger problem. Major corporations do not believe that people matter. They see labor purely as a line number on the financial statements. The lower that number, the more money Google or Facebook makes. Investors love more profits, the stock market value goes up, and it's all good.

I disagree. I understand that labor is absolutely subject to the same supply and demand laws as everything else. It is because of this understanding that I oppose programs like the H1B visas and unlimited criminal immigration. Both work to devalue the labor of the American employee. Mother Jones has a nice recap from 2013. I don't agree with them much, but here there is common cause.

That is shameful.

Likewise, Nike's reduction clauses or Hachette's copyright grabs seek to exploit the value of the work of the athlete or author while retaining all, or the majority of, the benefits to the corporation. Run, Boris, run, but not for New Balance and how dare Nick Symmonds wear something other than Nike apparel in his hotel.

That's why I don't buy Nike products any more - I flat don't trust them. Instead, I'll spend my money on shoes from Edna, the Kenyan start-up. Ditto, USATF. I sponsor my local cross country team, but I won't spend a dime for the USAFT if I can possibly help it.

I'm turning into a curmudgeon in my old age. I still think that the people around me matter. I wish our corporations and sports federations thought the same. Athletes should not be treated like prized racehorses, and shot (financially) if they break a leg. They're people who deserved to be treated with respect for the efforts they put forth and rewarded accordingly.

Tuesday Mash-up

USATF - New Plan to Reward Athletes

The USATF came out with a plan to share with athletes. Color me unimpressed. U.S. track and field: a ‘monumental’ step forward Based on the numbers, the USAFT is sharing ten percent of the revenue it gets annually with the athletes. Compare that to basketball, where the split is 49 percent for the owners, 51 percent for the athletes.

The second issue is that the program is explicitly designed to reward the upper tier of athletes, plus offers bonuses for medals. You're an up-and-coming sprinter? Too bad, no money for you, but Justin Gatlin, sprinter, drug cheat, gets endorsements and USATF loot.

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Why Do Schools Abuse a Third of Their Students?

As an introvert myself, and with kids and grandkids that are introverts, this article read like a horror story. For all the talk in the education system of teaching to the child, the truth is that education is dogma-driven. The current dogma insists on open classrooms, group projects, and collaborative learning.

Shoot me now.

I like working by myself. For the ninnies who say the real world doesn't work like that, too bad. My world does, because that's the way I designed it.

The Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric states students must “forego passivity in favor of contribution and participation...students must overcome isolation in order to learn to write.” Want to see me forgo passivity? Interrupt me while I'm writing. Better, ask my girls what the reaction is.

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Adventure Deficit Disorder?

I like the term. I don't live it, but I can understand it. Stephanie Cohen asks whether the modern lifestyle has robbed people of their sense of adventure. Do We Suffer From Adventure Deficit Disorder?  A good and quick read on an interesting subject.

Personally, I think most people don't seek adventure. Adventures have a tendency to introduce risk into life and most people are hard-wired to avoid risk.

Some of us, though . . .

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I've moved my two novels over to Kindle Unlimited. If you have a membership, you can read them for free. It's a weird (but pleasant) experience to watch the page counts as people read the books.

Does Running Have the Most Dysfunctional Governing Body in History?

Settle in, because I'm in a bit of a ranty mood.

I haven't comment on the doping scandals that popped in the news, first with the accusations against the Nike Oregon Project and, this past week, the IAAF data that got leaked. I hope the allegations are not true but fear that worse is still to come. Justin Lagat made a great point about the lack of names painting all elite runners with the same tarring brush. As he put it on Facebook, "From now henceforth, allegations with NUMBERS and NOT NAMES are a good as useless to me."

That said, running has a big problem with PEDs. The lack of names comes from the reluctance of the IAAF to enforce sensible rules to protect the honest athletes. Today, we get the news that the IAAF went back and found 28 athletes were using at the 2005 and 2007 World Championships. So far, no names have been made public.

Color me skeptical, but I don't think they would have gone back and looked at those results except for the data breach last week. The IAAF got embarrassed and is doing exactly what every entrenched bureaucracy does, throwing people under buses. Given an option, I think they'll do it by reputation and seek to avoid actually naming the individuals (as Justin pointed out). Much easier to smear (mostly retired) athletes by innuendo. Plus they get to point out how actively they pursue PEDs without doing anything about the current problems.

The various governing bodies need the spectacle of competition to drive revenues. World records also act to drive interest. It behooves them to treat the many questionable tests reported as outliers. An outrageous scenario? Look to Lance Armstrong and the International Cycling Union, whom Floyd Landis accused of protecting Armstrong.

Is it so hard to picture the same in running?

Now, on to Nick Symmonds.

USATF, in their usual immitigably tone-deaf manner, managed to bring back images of the bad-old-days of the AAU. As part of the agreement to be on the US team for Worlds, athletes are required to sign an agreement, part of which states that they will wear official Nike uniforms and gear at team events. The problem is that the term "team events" never gets defined. A good idea of what they meant can be inferred from a letter they sent along with the agreement, to wit: "Accordingly, please pack ONLY Team USA, Nike or unbranded apparel ..."

Man, it's almost like Nike hates real competition and uses the USATF as a bought-and-paid-for enforcement arm.

Remember the comment above about how bureaucracies react? Yep, they live down to that low standard. For starters, they questioned his honesty in bringing this up now when he had signed the agreement in the past. Of course, he was sponsored by Nike back then, so the point was irrelevant. Now he's sponsored by Brooks. He'd like to honor his contract by wearing Brooks gear at appropriate times. Hard to do when you're told to leave all your branded gear that doesn't have a swoosh on it at home.

According to Nick, he got hassled by USATF officials in a hotel lobby for wearing Brooks stuff. I am unclear on how coffee-drinking becomes a team event. Nick evidently had similar questions, hence the reluctance to sign the contract without a better definition of terms.

The USATF refused to define the term. When Symmonds didn't sign, they sent out him a nicely passive-aggressive email stating, "Without you having submitted a fully executed USATF Statement of Conditions for the 2015 IAAF World Championships, I am disappointed to have to inform you that you will not be named to the U.S. Team in the men's 800m event."

Yep, all Symmonds' fault and they are so disappointed, but not enough to go against Nike.

Now, in the aftermath, the attacks continue. Alan Abrahamson, noted Olympic writer, put forth an article that seeks to subtlety paint Symmonds as greedy and looking to enhance the Symmonds brand. Cueing Abrahamson, "Consider: This predicament is entirely of Symmonds’ own making." This piece of prejudicial writing comes early in the article, clearly to color everything that follows.

Later in the article you can nearly hear Abrahamson harrumphing as he writes, "That he said he made “several offers” to help USATF draft a new Statement of Conditions is misleading and unhelpful . . .  who is Symmonds to take it upon himself to undertake such an individualized effort?"

Abrahamson finishes with a nice piece of character assassination:

Oh, and if 1:44.53 is your season’s best in the 800, and you’re looking at a field in Beijing that is going to be dramatically better than it was in Moscow two years ago, and you’re at risk of not even making the finals, you might make the choice that it’s better for your brand not to go but, instead, cast yourself as a crusader in the vein of the saintly Steve Prefontaine against USATF.

The doping problems, the sponsorship strongarm, follows on the heels of the delegate mess earlier this year where the governing board of the USATF overrode the vote of the membership to place USATF President Stephanie Hightower onto the IAAF board instead of Bob Hersh. Willie Banks, former Olympian and Board member summed it up succinctly as "totally unforgivable." 

It's becoming quite apparent that the organizing bodies have no respect for the athletes they presume to govern. It's almost like the athletes exist to fund the USATF for the employees instead of representing the best interests of the sport.

It's Tuesday, in July, and it's hot.

What, you thought there might be actual content here today?

Fine. Cutting a check for the Lewis Clark Animal Shelter for their share of the sales of A Walk with Rose. Actually, cutting a bigger check. The shelter can use the funds and the story hasn't sold as well as I hoped. Slightly bummed about that.

More. Okay, How about the US Mountain Running Championships in Lincoln, New Hampshire over the weekend? The race was the Loon Mountain Race, rated by Runners World as one of the toughest in the country with an insane 2200' of climb in 5.5 miles. Friends and former running buddies Ashley and Ross Krause took the line as members of their respective teams. Ashley runs with the ladies on Western Mass Distance Project while Ross is part of the Central Mass Striders. Both teams took first place in the Overall Divisions. Very pleased for my friends. BTW, here's the USATF page for the race. Fortunately, others actually thought people would like to know how things turned out. Here's some links that have news about the athletes. Here, here, and results. A nice blog post with photos is here.

The local running club, the Seaport Striders, are putting on a race on August 8th in Asotin. It's the Striders Benefit Run, and the proceeds get divvied up between the participating local schools - Asotin, Clarkson, and Lewiston. When? Friday, August 8 @ 7 p.m.  Here's the entry form.

If you're running with your dog, it's supposed to be hitting triple digits most of this week and next. Here's a post I wrote about keeping your best friend safe.

Don't forget to keep yourselves safe out there.

Are you reading Lauren Fleshman's Blog?

Lauren Fleshman is absolutely one of my favorite athletes, not because of what she does on the track or roads, but by her integrity. The lady tells it straight, often with a huge dollop of humor.

A case in point for integrity. This article, Why A Convicted Doper as the USA Team Coach is a Bad Idea.

Money quote:

Zero Tolerance was a big deal to me. It indicated that my governing body cared about restoring our image. It sent a strong message to an impressionable, high achieving me, and influenced my decisions to remain clean. I am part of a generation that has been tested a zillion times more than any group before me. It’s been a pain in the ass but worth it. People would still cheat, but now it would be harder and the world knew it. USATF would out you, even if you were our biggest star, and they backed it up with actions. Should I be lucky enough to win an Olympic Medal, I wanted the chance to do so without the global assumption that I was dirty and USATF was covering up for me. It meant that anyone who represented the USA would be under a microscope. That, for the sake of all of our reputations, we would not be put side to side with cheaters and look guilty by association. As a clean athlete, this meant everything to me.

Go read the whole article. Then read her blog, often.

And for fun, track down the Runner's World column she wrote on the 5K versus the marathon. It's funny, with a dash of truth.