Yeah, so, it turns out that a North Carolina-based company called Capstone Event Group quietly acquired the rights to host Bay to Breakers back in 2019, and now when you pay your registration fee it is going to an organization whose founder is a donor to far-right-wing political candidates, and Donald Trump.
Also known as Capstone Races, the company organizes race events primarily around North and South Carolina, like the Charleston Marathon and the Myrtle Beach Marathon, but they also host the Hamptons Marathon on Long Island. As the Chronicle reports, “Capstone’s board chair is John Kane, a former North Carolina college football player who founded the company after becoming an endurance athlete.”
And Kane, as the Twitter account @KnowtheCEO tweeted on Wednesday, is a donor to the campaigns of right-wing nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene and a PAC supporting Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, as well as the WinRed PAC. Â The Chronicle also pulled up the federal election donation data on Kane, and found that he’s also donated to the Senate campaigns of Rand Paul, Jim Jordan, and Josh Hawley, and he donated $2,800 to the Trump campaign in October 2020.
Greene, as you likely know, is a wildly disturbed, misinformation-spewing right-wing-bullshit machine who likes to scream about abortion being murder, talk about QAnon as if it is a real thing, and once suggested that the Camp Fire in Paradise was started by Jewish space lasers. Most recently she’s been part of the “Putin Caucus” in the House who have been vocally against sending aid to Ukraine and who are still parroting Donald Trump’s words of admiration for Vladimir Putin. Because they are crazed and feckless and want to appeal to some insane, Trump-worshiping base who they hope will reelect them.
A donation to any effort to reelect Greene should be enough to besmirch any company. And Gaetz recently tried to criticize all female abortion rights protesters as “over-educated, under-loved millennials… with no bumble matches.” But Kane’s donations to other racist, homophobic, January 6th-denying pricks like Hawley and Jordan should give everyone who’s paying to run in Bay to Breakers pause.
Also, it should give sponsors like Zappos and United pause. As @KnowtheCEO noted on Twitter, Zappos claims to be “dedicated to supporting and uplifting LGBTQIA+” people, but Greene, for one, is one of the most virulently homophobic political figures out there. Let alone the rest of the Republican Party and whomever these PACs Kane donated to support.
Neither Capstone nor Kane have responded to requests for comment from KRON4 or the Chronicle.
So, liberal San Franciscans who support abortion rights and LGBTQ civil rights and immigrants’ rights who haven’t yet paid your registration fees for Bay to Breakers, are you still going to pay? We are definitely not encouraging you to show your small protest by entering the race at a later point and not giving your money to anyone who thinks Marjorie Taylor Greene is fit for office. That would be against the rules!
Previously: A Brief History and Fun Facts About Bay to Breakers, a.k.a. Straight Pride, a.k.a SF’s Oldest Footrace
Top image: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) attend a campaign rally for J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, at The Trout Club on April 30, 2022 in Newark, Ohio. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
