Stephen A. Smith dropped an all-time uninformed take recently when he said that golfers and NASCAR drivers didn’t count as athletes.
It’s insane on both counts, but especially when it comes to NASCAR drivers or racing drivers in general, and NASCAR great Kevin Harvick has a prime example of why.
On the last episode of SPEED on Fox, hosted by Harvick and the voice of IndyCar, Will Buxton,
“Here’s the deal with Stephen A. Smith: this guy has no clue about racing,” Harvick said. “And I don’t mind people criticizing our sport or our drivers or our people, but if you don’t know anything about racing, just keep your opinion to yourself because you shouldn’t even have an opinion if you don’t know anything about a sport.”
Now, I think those comments Stephen A. made it pretty damn clear that he has no idea what he’s talking about, but Harvick told a story that shows just how off the mark he was.
He said that he was starting to get serious about his fitness and asked the people at Polar, a company that makes fitness trackers and smartwatches, to hook him up with a watch to wear while in the car.
“I did the first event, and I think I burned 3,200 calories,” he said. “It’s a 500-mile race, so you’re in the car for a long time, hot day, (we) didn’t have a lot of cautions that day.
“They called me the next week, and they said, ‘Hey, we’re going to send you another watch, there’s something wrong with that watch. We think we got a bad reading, so you’re just a race driver, there’s no way you’re expending that much energy.’
ZERO BS. JUST DAKICH. TAKE THE DON’T @ ME PODCAST ON THE ROAD. DOWNLOAD NOW!
At the next race, Harvick burned 2,400 calories thanks to a few more cautions.
“So the guy from Polar calls me, and he says, ‘Hey, you know, the first one is correct, the second one confirmed everything that we had going on,'” Harvick recalled. “‘The only thing that we see with that much of a calorie burn or constant heart rate are marathon runners,’ and he was totally caught off guard.”
It just goes to show how misinformed some people are about racing.
Which is fine, but maybe keep your comments about it to yourself.
