Track athlete Alaila Everett claims that striking Kaelen Tucker in the back of the head during the Virginia State Indoor Track Meet was by accident although most believer it was deliberate. Credit: New York Post

It’s sad, but not unnecessarily unprecedented to see violence in sports happen in the wake of frustration.

We remember Mike Tyson biting a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear during their 1997 heavyweight bout. Then there was that horrific incident during the U.S. Figure Skating Championships practice in 1994 that left Nancy Kerrigan whaling and holding her leg in a corridor after the husband of rival Tonya Harding had attacked her.

Alaila Everett (left) and Kaelen Tucker (right)  have been thrust into the spotlight after their violent scene during the Virginia Indoor State Track Meet in which it appears that Everett struck Tucker in the back of the head with a baton during their 4×200-meter relay race. Credit:EURweb

But what we witnessed earlier this month during the Virginia State High School League Indoor State Championships and the aftermath that is still playing out seems right up with the worst sports violence incidents in this country. 

During the second leg of the 4×200 meter relay, all the videos I’ve seen show Alaila Everett deliberately and violently bashing Brookville High School junior Kaelen Tucker over the back of the head with the baton at least five times. Tucker came crashing down on the infield surface, suffering a concussion and possibly fractured skull, while Everette continued with the race.

What’s happened since this display of Black-on-Black track violence has vacillated somewhere between surreal and absurd. 

Everett has been charged with assault and battery and could be facing expulsion from school and a ban from track & field. But Everett is trying to convince us all that we didn’t really see what we saw.

Everette wants us to believe that it wasn’t intentional.

“She was touching me to the point where I was pumping my arm, and the baton was hitting her arm,” Everett said to Norfolk’s WTKR News 3. “I lose my balance — my whole body turns, and then I pump my arms, so she got hit.”

Not surprisingly, Tucker has a very different memory of the events, and all the video supports her version.

“As we got around the curve, she kept bumping me in my arm,” Tucker said. “When we finally got off the curve, I slowly started passing her, and she hit me with a baton.”

While Everett has been the subject of national criticism and even some unfortunate death threats, she has received considerable support from her I.C. Norcom High School teammates, her community and even the Portsmouth NAACP.

Maybe that has helped, but Everett taking to social media to plead her case, at times resorting to tears, isn’t helping at all. She has apologized to Tucker through social media and in front of cameras but hasn’t done so in person.

Everett, who is a senior, is likely done competing as a track athlete, but she will certainly have to live with this very ugly attack for a long time. Such public acts of violence don’t just fade from memory. Just ask Tyson and Harding, who are still identified by their acts of poor sportsmanship three decades later.

Now it’s up to Everett to create a new narrative somewhere down the line.

I've been with The Defender since August 2019. I'm a long-time sportswriter who has covered everything from college sports to the Texans and Rockets during my 16 years of living in the Houston market....