Performance athletes and their bowel-movements

Performance athletes and their bowel-movements

Cory Doctorow Thu Jun 14, 2012 20:00 

ESPN's David Fleming looks at the strange world of athletic crap. Athletes can be so focused on performance, can subject their body to such overwhelming endurance-stresses, and can experience such violent trauma, that it's inevitable that sporting legend is littered with famous turds. Fleming explores the way that the press copes with sudden fecal matter, and how the public excuses what would otherwise be inexcusable when it happens in the context of sport. For example, when Paula Radcliffe stopped by the side of the road to have an urgent BM four miles from winning the 2005 London Marathon, a BBC announcer described it as "stretching out a cramp." David Inglis (author of A Sociological History of Excretory Experience) marvels at how Radcliffe was able to violate one of society's deepest taboos without any social disapprobation: "If Radcliffe had been out on the street in London a day earlier, walking with her kids or her dog, and stopped to relieve herself on the sidewalk, she would have been arrested, shunned and dropped by Nike within an hour. But the fact that she did it in the middle of a race made it not just okay but, in some weird way, kind of awesome."

Which brings us to the main subject of this story: Defcon 1, or "maximum readiness," which is what Moss experienced in Hawaii on that fateful day 28 years ago. Defcon 1 crosses all sports. In 1996, Boston Marathon winner Uta Pippig hit the tape tanned from tummy to toes in diarrhea, the aftereffects of what marathoners lovingly call runner's trots. And then there's Tony Stewart, whose own close encounters of the No. 2 kind are part of NASCAR lore. During a race at Watkins Glen in 2004, an ailing Stewart radioed his crew to get a relief driver ready, pronto, because he was having major league meat sweats. A few minutes later, the radio crackled with a sheepish update from Stewart: "Never mind." After he won, everybody on Victory Lane waited more than 10 minutes while Stewart detoured to his trailer to change race suits. (When he finally met the media, he joked that he'd been fixing his hair.) So just how mortified was he? We can only wonder. While Stewart has spoken candidly about the fatal risks of his profession, he refuses to talk about his one-car accident. As a topic of conversation, dying in a race car is okay; pooping in one is not.

When Moss painted the pavement in Hawaii, cameras from ABC's Wide World of Sports rushed in for a close-up. The klieg lights gave the scene a stark, horror film feel as millions watched in collective shock. But it wasn't the mess they were riveted by, even though Moss had soiled herself three times on national TV, in an era when the word crap might have been bleeped. What everyone really wanted to see was what would happen next. "Rising through the muck, literally, was this primal, spiritual notion in me that I had never experienced before," Moss says. "It said, 'Get up. Keep moving. Win.'"

After standing and staggering another 200 meters, Moss dropped again and began crawling the final 200 meters toward the tape, only to be passed, cruelly, 10 feet from the finish line by ... well, no one really cared. Moss' courageous finish made her an instant, and enduring, icon in the booming field of endurance sports. Right after the Hawaii race aired, she flew to New York for an interview with Jim McKay, who touted her performance as one of the defining moments in sports television history.

It happens (via Kottke)

(Image: Shit Dispenser, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from silly_little_man's photostream)