DC Triathlon by Arjubx.
Once more unto the triathabreach!
Last night the ANC met for its first session for the futuristically sounding year 2011. And pretty much right at the top of the agenda was a resumption of the dispute over triathlons in Georgetown.
For those of you who missed it last month, the ANC demanded to know how much the for-profit enterprise that runs the DC Triathlon (and the Nations Triathlon) donates to charity. In particular they wanted to know roughly what percentage of the event’s revenues went to charity. The owner of the company, Charles Brodsky, refused to answer the question, so the ANC told him to come back when he could.
Skip to last night. Representatives of the triathlon, Molly Quinn and Jill Hansen (Brodsky wasn’t there), talked up the merits of the organization that benefits from the charity (which they also run) called Achieve Kids Tri. As part of the presentation, Quinn asked a little girl named Eliza Bowling to come up and give a speech about her experiences with Achieve and how it helped her fight her own childhood obesity.
It was a move of brilliant audience misdirection. Why? Because Bowling had the crowd in her hand talking about how she has already run several triathlons and dropped her BMI significantly. She was great and GM congratulates her on her achievements and her skillful public speaking. But it was almost completely irrelevant. Nobody doubted the merit of the recipient of the charity. That wasn’t the question. The question was whether that recipient was getting enough of the money flowing through the event to justify turning over a public good to a private enterprise. Continue reading