Has There Been Progress?

A UK fitness magazine posts an article featuring hiking tips from a black woman known for founding a group that promotes diversity in the outdoors. They illustrate it with a photograph of a solitary white hiker.

A South African sports socks company launches its global ambassador programme with great fanfare. None of the 27 ambassadors are black.

Are these re-tellings of some mid-20th Century anecdotes about embarrassing marketing? Plotlines from a dystopian drama perhaps? Sadly not. These are examples of actual sports and outdoors marketing in February 2021.

As someone who is willing to go on the record to talk about the lack of diversity in trail running, and about racial inequality more generally, I’m often asked whether there has been progress. Of course, this is a difficult question to answer. Partly because there is no baseline data against which to measure progress. UK race organisers (some of them, at least) only began collecting ethnicity data last year, when we wrote to 40 of them with that request. Even now, the data we have is not nearly as comprehensive as we would like (though watch this space in two weeks for news of progress in that area). So any assessment of progress towards a truly inclusive and diverse sport is based on anecdote and personal judgement.

So, has there been progress? Yes. Would I rather live in 2021 than 1971? Yes. Are the trails more diverse than they were 50 years ago? Undoubtedly.

But there is an awfully long way still to go. An awful lot more to do.

Our latest data suggests fewer than 1% of entrants in UK trail races are Black: around 1 in 167. For the UK population as a whole, the comparable figure is 1 in 22. Next time someone tells you, in all sincerity, that the trails are for everyone, please ask them to explain those figures.

Clearly, the reasons for the disparity are complex. Equally clearly, shoddy marketing of the kind recently practised by Women’s Fitness and Versus Socks, is part of the problem. Too often, they represent the outdoors as it is, not as they claim they would like it to be. As a result, it stays the way it was. Racial diversity on the trails today looks like racial diversity in the UK as a whole in the 1980s.

Of course, both Women’s Fitness and Versus Socks both apologised on their social media channels. How could they not, given the moral and commercial imperatives? The picture of the white hiker was replaced with a picture of three black women, including the woman, Rihane Fatinukun, whose hiking tips were being illustrated. The global ambassador programme was halted, to enable a re-think. But questions remain. Why do these mistakes continue to happen? What are companies and brands going to do differently in future? How are they going to change their stakeholder engagement and decision-making, so that they stop getting it so wrong, and start contributing to meaningful progress?