2023 was certainly one for the books with regard to gender wars, and a December TikTok video of a man challenging Division 1 track star, Alahna Sabbakhan, to a race has since gone viral.
According to UVA Today, one of Sabbakhan’s boyfriend’s friends, who was not even a runner, bragged that he could beat her if they raced against one another.
Initially, the All-American athlete ignored the taunts. After all, she’d been hearing similar boasts for most of her life. But then she contemplated, “Why not?”
Although it’s almost the one-year anniversary from when the race took place last January, Sabbakhan stumbled across a video of the race and decided to post it on social media last December on TikTok. It has since amassed over 1.5 million likes.
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As she recounted to TODAY.com, the 22-year-old was getting ready for a workout on the track, when her “opponent” approached. “He didn’t really know what to challenge me in,” Sabbakhan said. “He was like, ‘Yeah, I could beat her in the 400’ — not realizing that that was one of the hardest track events and that was one of my secondary events.”
The video clip shows the two dueling it out. In the first half, the two appeared to be relatively even, but after the 200-meter mark, “she began to pull ahead as he lagged, clearly looking fatigued,” Runner’s World reports.
After it was all over, her opponent ended up being a good sport about it. “He wasn’t like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t fair.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,’” she stated. “I feel like it was just a really good learning experience. It showed people that they need to stop underestimating us — as in track athletes, female athletes.”
But as Sabbakhan has learned since posting about the race, this is evidently a “universal experience” for many females. “A lot of women were saying that they experienced that a lot, mainly men trying to challenge them in their sport or talent, or whatever they do,” she said.
A 2019 YouGov UK poll even confirms this claim—apparently “12% of men in Great Britain think they could score a point playing tennis against Serena Williams.”
Sabbkahan has her own theory for why men who aren’t athletes think they can beat women athletes. “We make it look so easy,” she said, adding, “People who sit on their couch…it’s so easy for them to just sit there and say, ‘Oh, I could do that, too, if I tried, if I trained for a little bit’ — not realizing how hard it actually is.”
