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A less ridiculously patronizing article might have made the point that Oprah and her ilk have popularized an extremely difficult sport, perhaps without properly making people aware of the need for extensive training beforehand.
But that was apparently not the point of this article, which reserved most of its wandering prose for denigrating amateurs--people who push themselves just for the thrill of beating their own times or proving that they could do something they once thought was beyond their reach.
That's kind of pathetic. (What next? A expose on how people trying to learn English are spitting in the face of Byron and Keats and dragging us all down with them in the process?) The author--and the editors who gave him a venue--should be ashamed. Maybe next week a more appropriate article on how organized sporting events, in spite of their rhetoric of promoting inclusion and amateur participation, are inevitably ruined by the sort of perverse cliquishness and hypercompetitiveness they engender?
