By Huxley Pruitt, Sports

30/4- Mathis Galland’s much anticipated air racing league has hit a snag this week. His decision to sign Marcy Quail, a woman bush pilot from the colonies’ northern territories, has sparked controversy amongst those racers already signed as well as the wider sports world.

“The idea of a woman competing with a man is patently ridiculous,” said Bart Blunderberg, a racer from Rommsbach who formerly served as an officer in the Crowndon Air Corps and announced his resignation from the league upon hearing the news. “It always has been. That’s why we have separate leagues in all other sports, if the women have leagues at all. It’s bad enough we have to race against these backwoods hicks from the Middle of Nowhere with their third rate scrap jobs, but women? From the colonies, on top of that? I’m done.”

Three other racers backed out at the news as well, all of them from the tentatively named Legacy League (a title self-proclaimed by those racers hailing from the military and private service amongst the Triumvirate aristocracy.) Mathis Galland does not seem worried, however.

“If they want to behave like children and stomp out of the room holding their toys, let them,” Galland said. “There is no room in my league for such behavior. And the nature of racing, one of mechanical, rather than physical, prowess and skill render the typical arguments against integrated sports leagues irrelevant in this matter. Not that that would matter, in Miss Quail’s case. She’s six foot four and two hundred pounds of pure muscle. When I went to recruit her, she’d just thrown some poor sod who’d gotten too fresh with her through a wall.

“If someone can maintain and fly their aircraft, I couldn’t give two wet [expletive removed] where they’re from or what their genitals are. It’s also noteworthy that those pilots who dropped out are from Crowndon, and the Crowndon military at that. It’s well known they don’t allow women in combat roles, while we here in Nor Easter do. Now, I don’t want to say that our fighting women are the sole reason we won the war, but…we have fighting women, and we won the war.”