This Confident Fella Challenged An All-American D1 Sprinter To A Race After Insisting He Could Beat Her And Of Course Gets Humiliated
Every day I see a few videos on the Internet where I wonder why someone would subject themselves to that type of online embarrassment. Some days it's a guy filming him picking up bananas from Target while setting up a tripod everywhere he goes, and today it's this moron.
My jaw dropped when I got to the part about him bringing out his parents and family and friends to watch him race a D1 sprinter thinking it would go any other way than south. And did that first part say my boyfriend's friend? Worst friend of the year award, despite maybe winning best boyfriend for knowing that his girl was going to embarrass his friend on a now multi-million view scale.
This story is gaining some traction on the internet so a local UVA paper where this girl is a sprinter at did a story on it, and the reason this guy gave for not performing was all-time:
Alahna Sabbakhan is an expert sprinter at the University of Virginia. She earned first-team All-America honors during the 2022 indoor season for her performance in the distance medley relay.
For reasons that elude her, one of her boyfriend’s friends boasted that he could beat Sabbakhan in a race. Further puzzling was the fact the friend was not a runner.
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He did. And he brought his parents and some other friends, too.
The pair lined up, the challenger in lane 1 and Sabbakhan in lane 2.
In a video that has since been viewed more than 10.5 million times on social media and featured on NBC’s Today.com website and in the London Daily Mail, Sabbakhan and her opponent, who “refused to believe that a woman could beat him in a race,” went head-to-head on the track.
After the race, Sabbakhan told UVA Today her opponent congratulated her and told her he was in a lot of pain and that he may have made a mistake by choosing not to eat that day.
“I guess he thought that was the best way to prepare for a race,” she surmised. “I told him, as a track athlete, that’s the worst way to prepare.”
Not eating? Did he think he was going to get energy from the sky above? And listen, I admire the bravado on this guy. I'm not necessarily above thinking he might have a -slight- chance in a very short sprint where he could lessen the skill gap a little bit to remove stamina from the equation. But how do you decide on a 400m as the race of choice? It's one of the hardest races in all of track, and attempting to do one against a trained runner when you don't ever run is practically suicide. Misogyny or meeso-genie as Portnoy says be damned, at least TRY to have a chance at competing and do something else.
This reminds me of the whole Serena Williams argument on Twitter a few years back where random guys on the Internet thought they could beat her in tennis. Or the worst guy you know who spends 4 hours a day hooping at LA Fitness thinking he has a chance against a WNBA player. If you want to talk about "delulu" which is what the kids are using to say delusional these days, those things might be listed next to it in the dictionary. Confidence is a scary scary thing when used incorrectly.
So where do we go from here? If you're this guy, your best guess is to lay off the social media for a few weeks until it becomes a thing of the past. I'd personally transfer schools, maybe start a new life in a new country with a new name, because I'm not walking around campus with everyone knowing I was the guy humiliated on the Internet due to being an over-confident goofball. Humility can be a powerful thing. Fuck around and find out indeed.