NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps addresses death threats, hateful messages toward Katherine Legge

Following the NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Rockingham, Katherine Legge revealed she had been inundated with hateful messages. Those ranged from death threats to hypersexualized comments and threats, as well as the more run-of-the-mill hateful words people use online.

Well, this week, Katherine Legge is racing again. She will be in the No. 32 car for Jordan Anderson Racing at Talladega.

Ahead of the weekend, NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps was asked about these hateful comments online. He was very serious in his condemnation of those words and threats directed towards Legge.

“I want to be crystal clear about this, we condemn this behavior. It is unacceptable, this is not appropriate for NASCAR, sports, or the world,” Phelps said to CNN.

“This is a woman who has competed very successfully in all forms of motorsports and we want her here at NASCAR. They can take their opinions and their hate right out of NASCAR because there’s just no place for it.”

Unforutnately, the nature of social media has made this more common. When athletes do poorly, fans step over the line and say horrible things. While it is common, it can’t be normalized.

Katherine Legge comments are unacceptable

Commissioner Steve Phelps is right. Those comments are abhorrent and do not belong in the sport. The truth of the matter is that there are dozens of men every year who come in and out of the sport, they get into wrecks and they make mistakes. It isn’t seen as a big deal.

When a woman comes into the sport, a spotlight is put on them. Their mistakes are scrutinized more, and most of the time, it is in bad faith. As more women get into the higher levels of racing, hopefully, that becomes less frequent.

Katherine Legge hasn’t done anything that every driver who has ever come into NASCAR hasn’t done. She’s new to the sport and to stock car racing on ovals. That is going to take time. It isn’t like her wreck at Rockingham was even egregious. It could have been avoided, but it wasn’t. Move on.

Hopefully, when Legge leaves Talladega, she can put it all behind her. So, have a good weekend, finish the race, and walk away with her head held high to the next race. There is just no place for this kind of reaction in the sport.

Drivers wreck, that’s NASCAR. I’d argue the mistake Kyle Larson made at the end of the Darlington race earlier this season was more over the top than anything Legge has done to this point.