In One Of The Great Injustices In Sports History, A Marathon Runner Was DQ'd For Chain Smoking During The Entire Race
DailyMail -- A Chinese marathon runner who chain-smoked his entire way through a 26.2 miles race has been disqualified, despite achieving a competitive time.
Uncle Chen, nicknamed the 'Smoking Brother', managed to complete the Xiamen Marathon in three hours and 33 minutes on January 7 this year.
But despite crossing the finish line only five minutes slower than his 3:28 finish two years ago, the 52-year-old was disqualified for 'smoking on the track'. He placed 574th out of more than 1,500 runners.
We have to pick a lane here, people. Are we going to start penalizing athletes for taking performance enhancing drugs, or are we going to penalize athletes from hacking darts and pumping their lungs full of some sweet, sweet carcinogens throughout a 26.2 mile race? It has to be one or the other, because penalizing both just seems preposterous.
We can all agree that Uncle Chen might just be the greatest athlete of our lifetime. And there was a time when we allowed our athletes to be great. There was a time when an athlete could be great and the internet wouldn't immediately rush to find old tweets to cancel them. There was a time when an athlete could be great and the world wouldn't start looking towards them to solve every little issue with our culture and society. There was a time when an athlete could be great and we'd let the chain smoke the shit out of a few packs of Marlboro reds in peace.
Those days are clearly long gone. I'm sure if Uncle Chen was ripping a mango flavored vape or some shit like that, nobody would care. Makes me sick to think about how soft and douchey society has gotten. The world was a better place when you could just rip a heater wherever, whenever. That world is no more, and the one that replaced it is now failing all of us. Especially Uncle Chen.