Today was the final day of the World Championships in Athletics — or track and field, as it is known in North America.

It was the first of several big events to be held in Russia in the next few years. The Winter Olympics in Sochi next February, the soccer World Cup in 2018.

They come as some segments of the global family have made clear their displeasure over laws recently passed in Russia that have been generally described as “anti-gay”.

Many Russians appear unhappy that they are being criticized, accompanied by whiff of boycotts-to-come in the air, and much of the anger seems to be directed at the United States, perhaps out of habit.

That anger led one prominent Russian sports journalist to wander off into a rant both nationalistic but also racist — joltingly so.

To set the scene:

The U.S. women’s 4×400 relay team was heavily favored to win the gold at the Moscow meet. The U.S. teams was made up of four African-Americans. The Russian team was a long-shot and also entirely ethnic Russian.

Long story short, the Russians won by a fraction of a second, before an enthusiastic home crowd. That sort of thing happens, to home teams at big events. You win some you won’t normally win.

However, perhaps in the context of the steady western criticism over Russia’s anti-gay laws, the editor of the Sovietsky Sport newspaper turned the 4×400 final into a race first and foremost about skin color.

A writer at Agence France-Presse described it as “a bizarre nationalist eulogy”, but this was about race. Not nationhood.

Wrote Yury Tsybanev:

“They were standing on top of the pedestal, our four little blondes, four Russian birch trees, and it was as if the blood of our ancestors boiled in my veins,” he said, boasting that our “fair-skinned girls massively beat the black-skinned ones”.

Hmm. And that is the writing of the editor of Russia’s leading sports newspaper, a publication so venerable that it hasn’t given up the “Sovietsky” part of its title more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Anyway, yes, an unpleasant aspect of an interesting meet, otherwise dominated by Usain Bolt and Mo Farah and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.

None of whom were “Russian birch trees”, by the way.