The grapes aren't always sour
Another intake of new applicants for FrontRunner. This period has always been an unpleasant one for me, but this year it's an outright nightmare.
Because this time the campaign to recruit new members ( and, with it, the announcement of the chosen few and the creation of many, many disappointed people) coincides with a new dramatic element.
The global FrontRunner policy for 2024 is to refresh the teams in all 32 countries where the project exists. The decision came down from above: we were not to renew the annual contracts of almost half the team, and we were to take on more new members than usual.
I knew in advance which of our teammates we would have to part ways with, but I couldn't predict how they would react. I assumed the reaction would be strongly negative, and to a large extent I understood them. These are people with whom we had built the community together, some of them over years. Some of them are my friends, and one of them is the person closest to me in the whole world.
What I did know well, though, was the behaviour pattern of the part of the running crowd that is keen to become a FrontRunner; a process that was running in parallel. I've come to know it painfully well over the 5 years I've been part of the team, and the focus on me personally has only grown in the last year, since I became captain.
I know who has applied even before I look at the list of applications. I can guess them with over 90% accuracy, thanks to the surge in little hearts, flattering comments and invitations for coffee and wine in my DMs right around the opening of the application phase.
Those of them who know me personally and know how to manipulate me properly have adopted the one correct strategy with regard to my personality. Namely – laughing at my jokes.
But however disarmed this leaves me, all I can do is help them get through “the first sifting”. I have no influence over the final result. Believe me, I've tried.
My sorry experience of the previous 5 years as a FrontRunner tells me that the shelf life of my newly hatched popularity is exactly one month, and it expires with the announcement of the names of our new teammates.
As a child I read a story that is a wonderful metaphor for the transience of my FrontRunner celebrity. Its subject was a colourful poster announcing some concert. The concert came and went. It started to rain, and the glue and the colours of the poster ran. As it slid down the advertising column, our hero whispered “Sic transit Gloria mundi”.
How well I understand that poster! People I thought I was on wonderful terms with, but who weren't picked by the brand, start walking past me, looking at me from under contemptuous eyelids, without saying hello.
The only hearts under my stories will come from Anna Vancheva, Emo ( if it happens to be a moment when we're not fighting), a few of my girlfriends, and the members of what Sasho Nakov calls “my hard-core electorate”.
Nakov's opinion of said hard-core electorate is tied to a not particularly optimistic analysis of its purchasing power, in connection with the projected sales of “Nothing to Fear”. It is, and I quote:
“50% people waiting for their pensions and 50% people waiting for their mums to hand over their pocket money.”
Sasho is a salesman and, unlike me, looks at everything with a mercantile eye. Me, I'm just glad I have some support after all. I need it. In the old days, the ones who didn't get picked would “get their own back” for years on end. In 2021-2022 I was left speechless by the comments of rejected applicants who, in “Running for Health”, never missed a chance, under threads that had nothing to do with FrontRunners, to find a way to say something negative about us.
Mainly about how we can't run, but not only that. Blissfully forgetting that only a few months earlier they had filled in a form in which, with Young Pioneer zeal, they had answered the question “why do you want to become part of this inspiring community” ( Yes, I have access to all the applications going back years, and yes, I have taken the trouble to check).
“Sour grapes” is a defence mechanism of the human psyche, and a perfectly understandable one. I say this not with bitterness but as a fact, and I don't exclude myself from this behavioural stereotype. I too have often explained away situations with “I'm far too good for this lot”.
My reason may well have been aware that the truth was I just wasn't right for the brand's image. Or that somebody simply didn't take to my book ( who could fail to like my masterpieces I cannot imagine, but apparently there are plenty of such misguided readers out there J ). Or that I wasn't bringing in enough money for my employer to justify my salary.
People are slaves to their egos and their primal instincts. It's normal that their first reaction is to look for something to cling to so they can move on with their self-respect intact. And in the absence of other mechanisms, such as the capacity for objective self-analysis or being generally content with themselves, that's where they stay – arm stretched up – towards the sour grapes.
But that's only human. Nobody is obliged to behave nobly, and I never expected anyone to, in a situation where they felt hurt and vulnerable.
I'm writing this blog to express my admiration for my former teammates. They found themselves in a situation that, besides being emotionally unpleasant for them, stripped them of the many material perks they used to get on the team, as well as of our little mini-community itself.
Yes, it's true that we'll still see each other, and we'll still go running together, and with one of them I'll still be living under the same roof, but it won't be the same.
And it's especially unpleasant when you know you've been an active part of the community, you've contributed a lot to it, you've felt at home in it, and you have objectively stronger qualities, as well as measurably better running results, than people who are staying in that community.
With that in mind, I want to express my boundless admiration for Maria, Nora, Georgi, Emo, Rado, Kris and Momchil.
Every one of them could not only have started a smear campaign against me and Angel, they could have done it strategically. They could have waited a whole month after finding out and only then published their posts. Doing it around the time the new recruits are announced, they could easily have ridden the wave of discontent among the rejected applicants. The older members of the team know that this is the perfect moment for that kind of operation. True, this year the public grumbling was extremely isolated, ( it seems more and more decent people are applying), but still….
Georgi Mozheyko, for example, is 18 years old, a national champion in mountain climbing, with 1:53 for the 800 m and a pile of other achievements. The only one I know precisely is the 800m time, because my son has 2:01 over the same distance and Georgi is his distant and unattainable idol. I was worried about how a kid like him, because even though he's nearly 2 metres tall, he's still a kid, would take the news. I won't even mention that his mother is a friend of mine. I saw him at the Athletics Weekend tournament, gave him a hug, and he said to me with a smile, “ I'll get over it.”
Of course you'll get over it, Zhorka, you have so many qualities, both as a person and as an athlete. Your success and your self-confidence don't depend on whether some brand gives you kit. Besides, I'm sure that in the very near future lots of brands will want to sign a sponsorship deal with you, but this time – as an elite athlete. That is, only if you decide to choose the path of sport, because your talents are so varied that you can shine brilliantly in any field you like.
Maria, for her part, told me quite sincerely: “I got really sad, because being a FrontRunner was something of my own, something just for me. It gave me my own space ( she has two small children), a chance to meet lots of people at the international meet-ups and training camps. Yes, I'm sad that I won't be part of it any more.”
And even though she's sad, she published the most positive post, in which she expressed her gratitude for having been part of this project and for the amazing moments she had lived through.
Kristiyan did exactly the same. Speaking of Kris – if any lady would like to feast her eyes on the instructor while she trains, here is this handsome lad's schedule at Next Level. You'll only be feasting your eyes, since he's in a serious relationship, but that's not nothing either.
And now I come to the person I admired secretly and from afar even before I knew him personally. Momchil.
I knew he was the first Bulgarian to qualify on merit for Ironman in Kona, Hawaii. I knew a few other things about him too, one of them being that he organises triathlon camps and a brand-new triathlon event – Tri Legend Batak https://www.facebook.com/events/1233075771339008, has a triathlon podcast – “Zone 2”, and is admin of several groups for the sport in question.
While he was part of the team, he raced at Almira in May. And despite the invasion of our homegrown, kitted-out representatives at that event, only two Bulgarians made the top ten, and the best performance was Momchi's ( I think he was 5th overall). You won't find that out unless you dig through the results, because he doesn't breathe a word about it.
Right. Then came the unpleasant moment when Acho and I had to tell Momchi that his annual contract with ASICS would not be renewed. I showed a weakness of character, but this task was so unpleasant for me that I couldn't find the strength to join the video call and left Acho to deal with it on his own. I was sure Momchil would behave beautifully, but I couldn't have that conversation with someone I had, in a way, put on a pedestal and who outdoes me in everything. As you can see below – in conduct as well.
Acho reported back that he had done the “dirty work”, and I, now that the floor had been swept, left Momchil a voice message. Cowardly, I know, but sometimes that's as much as I can manage.
Some time later, we received the following email from Momchi ( published with his consent):
I ran out of space, but the screenshot is missing the link to his triathlon:
Even though it falls on my elder son's 18th birthday, I'll figure out a way to take part.
I'm publishing Momchi's email for several reasons. First and foremost, for the sheer pleasure of yet more proof that when a person is on a high level, that high level shows in their behaviour in every single situation.
Second, because I was raised on the socialist “What will people say?”.
To this day I blame my poor mother for trying to drum into my head that the opinion of her former neighbours in the Hadzhi Dimitar district about me, for example, should be the guiding light whenever I make major decisions about my life. Over the years I've lurched between the two extremes – from not standing up for myself so as not to annoy neighbours, colleagues and the women at the corner shop, to parading a stupid show-off attitude along the lines of “I don't pay the public-opinion tax”.
But I've finally arrived at the truth, or at least at the formula that works for me. I don't care about the opinion of distant acquaintances, or of people who, through their actions or their words, have lost my respect.
What I do care about, deeply, is the opinion and advice of people who are better than me and whose actions I admire. Because those opinions and actions will act as a corrective for me, for my own actions and for my behaviour.
All the FrontRunners this blog is dedicated to remain, for me, people whose opinion matters. Because they behaved with dignity at a moment when they were vulnerable, and many of them probably offended too.
As for Emo, I can say that the family row on the subject of “my wife fired me with her own two hands” was so mild that we didn't even manage to wake the neighbours' baby. And we've woken that baby very often, arguing fiercely over matters on the level of “Why did you buy such a tiny pack of pork neck, Niyo!”.
On top of that, the juicy gossip reached my ears from several directions that Emo is actually going to carry on getting kit in secret, and that the non-renewal of his contract is in fact fake, staged to convince everyone of the non-existent transparency of the process.
Emo, Emo, wherever you go, your name gets mixed up in undercover operations! Yet more proof that there's no such thing as an ex-cop, hah!
For me personally, there's no such thing as ex-teammates either. I know I can't give you the material perks you got as part of the FrontRunner project.
But people for whom the grapes aren't sour will never be left alone, without support, or – since we've got going with the garden metaphors – left to wither on the vine.
