Intro for October 8, 2024

Dear Gossips,    

I was today year’s old when I realised that American Ninja Warrior is a real thing. Like I may have seen a commercial for it here and there but nothing ever really took hold in my consciousness until this morning, when for whatever reason, a video of one of the competitors just popped up on my feed and ordinarily I would have kept scrolling but what stood out to me was that he was doing the course in a suit. 

Like a shirt and tie and vest and jacket and trousers, WTF? 

This comment under that post sent me… 

His name is Donovan Metoyer, and apparently he’s known as the “classy ninja” because he’s always doing this sh-t in a suit. Watching Donovan destroy that run (and, sorry, maybe this is considered average to the experienced American Ninja Warrior audience but as a neophyte, I’m gagged) led me to some casual googling about the show, which is when I learned that it’s currently in its 16th season. SIXTEEN SEASONS?! And that brought me to a piece in Sports Illustrated about the show and its subculture, the warrior or ninja gyms where these athletes do ninja training specifically for these kinds of competitions, and all the kids who are obsessed with it, some of them have found that doing ninja is the only place they fit in. There are leagues and federations all over the place and for a while there, the sport was experiencing exponential growth. That kind of rapid expansion is often accompanied by scandal – and there’s been a serious and disturbing one on the ninja community when its biggest star was arrested for sex crimes. So there’s a lot of work to be done before the sport can get into… the Olympics. Because, yes, that’s what they’re pushing. 

Like I said, I was introduced to all of this an hour ago. And I guess my point is that we all have culture gaps. It’s literally my job to know about movies and music and TV shows and only today did I actually become aware of this whole ninja business. But now my f-cking algorithm just got tweaked and I wonder how much ninja I’ll be inundated with from this point on. Ask me in a month if I’ve become an expert.   

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey