By: Dennis Young

There is perhaps nothing more condescending and dignity-defying in sports than the pity clap for the late-finishing runner. Rather than signifying compassion and salutation, it signifies an insult: You're so slow, we applaud you for even finishing. That's a degree of terribleness that no one else at this meet achieved. There are no extenuating circumstances that could possibly justify a round of applause for a last place finisher.

And yet, not only has the pity clap continued, chafing hands and shading athletes across the land--it has proliferated. Its cousin--the arm around the shoulder of a fallen runner to speed up their death march off the course, which I'll call The Assist--has recently been a proven driver of social media popularity, and has therefore been happening more. That needs to stop. After several prominent walk assists in late 2014, Sarah Barker wrote a piece for Deadspin theorizing that the common denominator in each of the assists was that they were essentially outside of a highly competitive context. The most famous of incidents came at last year's NCAA DI cross country nationals, where Baylor's Madison Zimmerman and Minnesota's Kate Bucknam helped Zimmerman's struggling teammate Ann-Marie Dunlap across the line.



Bucknam and Zimmerman finished 239th and 240th; neither was in her team's scoring five, and exactly thirteen runners in the race finished behind the duo. Despite multiple media accounts claiming the opposite, Dunlap was disqualified. (Here are two results that don't include her.) The Baylor-Minnesota assist dovetailed with Barker's theory that most assists are meaningless from a competitive perspective--whether or not Bucknam and Zimmerman helped Dunlap, their race was already shot. This is basically fine; one runner pulling a competitor across the line when both are near the end of a terrible performance is essentially mercy-killing a bad race. Anyone who's had a truly horrendous race can identify with the desire to pass out and be pulled across the line by a friend. Barker's article concluded with an instagram video of Alexa Efraimson collapsing at the 2014 Silicon Valley Turky Trot 5k. With more than $12,000 on the line, no one stops to help the 17-year-old:

A video posted by Kevin Liao (@liaopics) on Nov 27, 2014 at 8:51am PST

Competitors--who we can assume are not particularly morally deficient--mercilessly blow by the teenage Efraimson with zero compunction. And that's fine! Sans arm-around-shoulder assist, Efraimson staggered across the line and finished ninth. If she were truly unable to get herself across the line that close to the finish, the medical staff present--like at every race ever--would have given her timely attention. But the massive attention showered on the assists on social media and beyond guaranteed that the practice would creep from the back of the pack to the middle and the front, where it's a real problem. If the pity clap says "we applaud your terribleness," then the walking assist says "You are literally incapable of walking for at most a few minutes without my physical superiority." Which brings us to Iowa.

This weekend, Zach Hougland--winner of an Iowa district cross country championship--was basking in his glory five minutes after his title when he saw a competitor struggling to finish fifteen meters away from the line. So the champ jumped back on the course and pushed Mediapolis's Garrett Hinson seven of those fifteen meters. Hougland was promptly and righteously disqualified. Setting aside how ridiculous it is to push someone seven meters when they need to go fifteen--imagine if you decided to pull someone out of a burning house and you got them from, like, the kitchen to the living room--I am, for the first time in my life, taking the side of an officious adult against a passionate and well-meaning teenager. The internet zigged where it normally zags, though. Here's a small sampling of people furiously and incorrectly demanding Hougland's reinstatement in our twitter replies and elsewhere:

@milesplit @MileSplitIA no, its called having good sportsmanship.
-- SQUI®®EL (@aimiemarshall) October 24, 2015

@milesplit @MileSplitIA There's a problem in our sport when sportsmanship constitutes disqualification

-- Hampton (@haddiss1) October 24, 2015

@milesplit @MileSplitIA So, being a good sport means getting disqualified? That's unacceptable....
-- Tyler Jennings (@CCTrojan2488) October 24, 2015

First, imagine how embarrassing this saga has been Hinson. It's already bad enough to underperform and struggle to the finish; it's way worse to have your apparent inability to walk forty feet at the end of a 5k blasted across the internet for hot viral content.

Second, the fragile truce reached by Barker's Unifying Theory of Assists--that helping runners across the line is reserved for meaningless competition--falls apart in a smaller meet. By helping Hinson across the line, Hougland essentially declared that the competitive outcomes achieved by lesser teams and individuals were meaningless to him. If Hinson were able to finish by his own volition in, say, twenty minutes (two minutes slower than his best time on the season), Mediapolis would have finished one place higher. In fact, Hougland effectively chose helping a guy halfway to the finish over the season-long efforts of his teammates. His DQ added a full twenty-nine points to the Davis County team score. And he knew it would, too, telling WHOtv that, "I knew I couldn't help him finish so I just gave him a push and told him you can do it." If you're going to get disqualified for an assist, at least drag the dude all the way to the finish. But you should be disqualified for the assist.