The Alphafly Outcry: Distance Running, Technological Doping, and the Rhetoric of Stigma

Abstract

Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-two-hour marathon in 2019 generated both wide-ranging celebration and stern denigration from members of the running community. The latter, motivated by an unexpectedly superior result, turned to stigma rhetoric to protect what they saw as a danger to their sport: the Nike Alphafly. Stigma is an othering strategy that brands its objects as undesirable and threatening to the ideological center of a community. In Kipchoge’s case, his shoe was characterized as technological doping, and rhetors used the framework provided by stigma to imbue the shoe with a moral dimension to warn others away from the threat to the running community’s egalitarianism. This case demonstrates how sport communities perceive and respond to threats to their essential natures through common rhetorical frameworks.