Mary Tried to Rejoin NOP in April 2019

Banana Bread wrote:

Mary never got the happy endings after her massages

^^This is what I'm most shocked about - Banana Bread falling completely out of character

NERunner053 wrote:

A lot of these posts & threads on Mary are really disappointing. We don't need men to get together and be the judge & jury on what happened. She shouldn't be shamed. The only conversation to be had is how to fix things now so nobody else has to go through anything remotely similar. LRC should be doing a better job looking at these posts. It's obvious to anyone following the sport that this is wrong and that you can see the outpouring of support Mary is receiving from people involved in the sport at every level. What she did took a lot of courage. We need to change things now. Athletes need better resources. We need more female coaches. We need more coaches who know what their real expertise is and to outsource resources their athletes need (psychologists, nutritionists, etc.).

We don't need to manshame. I am male and very much in Mary's corner. I am sure some of the idiots putting Mary down are female as well. I do agree though that there should be some females on each staff, not that it's a perfect fix but I think it could help. For many women/girls it's hard to approach a male with certain problems.

I am assuming that Mary Cain had been working with a therapist. It sounds like she simply made a recent breakthrough... realizing that her identity does not need to revolve around her running career. This type of problem is common among celebrities and overachievers.

Kara Goucher is pretty much spot on. None of these accusations are new. Other athletes have made similar complaints for years. But treating a teen phenom like trash is certainly a new low.

bladerunner wrote:

... And in fairness to Salazar, why would he have any interest in coaching someone who is a) overweight and b) not even remotely capable of running national class times? He wouldn't. Not when you have the best female runner in the world in your camp.

Just in case he forgot - you should call Salazar and remind him that he has one of the best runners in the world in his camp. And that he has a camp. And wish him well in his appeal maybe he'll be allowed to coach again before Tokyo 2020

I think going pro in high school is a big reason Mary ended up in this mess. Had she gone to college for a few years, she would have had a coach and teammates. She would also get to know the other top 1500 runners going to regionals and nationals. She would have had a network in place for support and could have called up her old coach or other runners and said "is what Salazar doing normal?" and could have found options for other training groups if she wasn't happy. But in high school, she just had her old coach and her parents. I can now see why she would feel that NOP was a monolithic force in the distance running world that she had to go through in order to get on the world stage.

Coachy Coach wrote:

I can see why Kara has a problem with it. Depending on how you read it they are pretty much saying that Mary is a liar (in a nice way) and that she made up the claims because she didn't get accepted back on the team earlier this year. Not my words just what I could see someone making out of that statement.

Mary is someone that needs support regardless of what you may think Alberto did or didn't do. She is an amazing talent and one that I hope we can keep within the sport moving forward. She absolutely could come back with the right support. I would coach her for free.

Peoples perception of situations can differ significantly. How Mary perceives what happened and what other people did might not be the same thing. How an anorexic perceives comments about wieght and how normal people do can differ. And so on.

Now Al Sal has never come across as a warm a fuzzy guy. Does he cross the line into abuse? That is a lot tougher to say. One persons beloved gruff coach is someone else abusers. Personally I would be a lot more interested to her about her thyroid and other sketchy grey areas things AlSal was pushing than if he thought she was 5lbs overweight.

The general success rate of turning any prospect into an international star is pretty grim. When was the last time Efraimson, Kate Murphy, or Christina Aragon beat their HS prs? Elise Cranny would have been on that list til the end of this year. Now some of them are treading water (i.e. they are still running the 4:10s they were in HS which is a bit different than running say 4:20 but none of them have taken the step from 4:10 runner to the one that is threating to break 4:00. And if you look at the sub 4:00 guys, you aren't seeing a lot of them turning into 3:35 guys either.

I'm very disappointed in lots of the posters on this forum in their eagerness to dismiss this. The instant they think Mary did something slightly contradictory or did an activity in a way they can't imagine the method of they try to brush off the entire thing. There is a very good chance that Mary was caught up in Al Sal's cult of personality like so many others. Her joining as a teen, sticking around longer than she should've, or trying to rejoin does not mean none of this happened-all it means is that she was in a place where she thought she needed to be in the NOP, which is quite understandable because Nike has a deathgrip on this sport.

This stupid reasoning from LetsRun scum extend to other things like cutting. Oh, no cut marks on her wrists? Guess she made it up!!! People have never cut themselves in areas such as the inner thigh or cut themselves in such a manner where the scar is subtle and doesn't look like they drive over an IED!

Try to think for 5 seconds before posting you ingrates. Human beings don't exist to carry out objective functions that 100% agree with your world view.

Precious Roy wrote:

I think going pro in high school is a big reason Mary ended up in this mess. Had she gone to college for a few years, she would have had a coach and teammates. She would also get to know the other top 1500 runners going to regionals and nationals. .

How many HS kids go to college and then disappear? How many posts have there been on this board about college kids ruining athletes over the years? One thing we know is that if Mary went to college and performed like she did, she wouldn't have gotten a pro contract. Did she get enough to take on this risk? Since things didn't work out we can make a list of things that she should have done differently (gone to college, stay with the HS coach, only bump the mileage by 10 miles instead of 20, lose 2lbs instead of 5,....). There is no way to know if any of them would have made a difference.

Interesting, for someone who was so called damaged and abused , wanted so badly to come back to the program that did this to her as she claims. Pulling away the surface stuff, it seems her fall from grace as an athlete you to blame someone or some system or a combination. Living a life in the limelight of a child star, girl wonder and then being tested, challenged with maybe the results that don't work out as expected. Failed protégées are just that, not everyone of them makes it to adult greatness no matter the formula.

The personal emotional outburst that Mary was looking for a more emotional deeper connection was an outcry beyond Salazar and NOP.

Interesting the failed , dropped, cut athletes from NOP all have anger and quick to blame that their issues are all to blame to somebody else, nothing to do with them. Not all athletes will flourish under in the so-called perfect program.

Super elites are not an easy bunch, the fall from the top is a little further and finding the reasons why even more.

One of the biggest problems with the reaction here is that we expect victims to be heroes. The corollary of that is that if Cain (or Magness, Goucher, etc.) is not a hero, then she's not a victim. And so the discussion becomes a referendum on Cain, not on Salazar and the NOP.

It doesn't matter if Cain's a good person. Maybe she's a wonderful person; maybe she's a horrible person who just wants to get back at Salazar for not letting her rejoin NOP. (Obviously I would hope for the former.)

It doesn't really matter too much. What matters is that Salazar, by many different people and for many different reasons, has been accused of being a scumbag. Disbelieving this doesn't just require disbelieving Cain, but also Cam Levins, for instance, and many other people. And it requires another explanation for the weirdness that we've always known was there with Cain and the NOP.

If Mary Cain were the only person who has said something this negative about Salazar, then it would be her words against his, and it would be perfectly reasonable to question her motives and her character. But they're simply not relevant in a world where many others have said the same thing, and none of the accusations are inconsistent with who we already think Salazar is.

It's perfectly reasonable to say something like "Salazar's 4-year ban was too harsh given the relatively meager doping violations that USADA was able to prove". But to assert that Salazar isn't a major pox on the sport requires that you dismiss or disprove: the proven doping violations (and suspicion of more), the grey area behavior, the psychological manipulation of athletes including publicly berating them and focusing disproportionately on their weight, the hostility to the media, trying to get personal information of Letsrun posters, and intimidating rival athletes and coaches while playing politics with the rules of the sport (i.e. the Gabe Grunewald DQ).

In this ecosystem, the force isn't with any one accusation, but with the sum total of all of them. That's why it isn't about Mary Cain: it's about Alberto Salazar and the things that he's done.

Salazar responded:

https://twitter.com/KenGoe/status/1192842579248730113

He enclosed a text message he says Cain sent to him in April that included this passage:

“Thanks again so much for a great trip -- I’m excited to be working together again and I really want this. Haha got back to a chilly morning in NY and even skipped class just to prioritize training and recovery since that’s my No. 1.”

its always so interesting that it seems like Salazar has more evidence for his defense that any accuser in any of his cases has against him

Mary The Liar wrote:

She also got a big fat check from the New York Times for her 'story'.

It's not the National Enquirer, they don't pay people for their stories (or to bury their stories). Stop spewing lies.

Thank you for the clarification. My heart goes out to Mary Cain for all that she suffered. The fact that she tried to rejoin NOP in the spring of 2019 shows how complicated her emotional situation was. She didn't change her perception of AS and NOP until after he ghosted her and then his ban was announced. If they had let her join again this past spring, that would have harmed her further. I agree with her that that training system absolutely needs to change and that having some women coaches/psychologists/nutritionists would help, but there are abusive women as well as abusive men, so that is not the whole answer. I hope she saved some of the $$$ NIKE paid her and that she can heal and go forward with her life, whether she competes at the elite level again or not. It took courage for her to speak out and I am glad she did.

I was just about to say... Although Salazar needs to retire and disappear for a while, I could see him fighting back very hard on this and going after Mary and the NYT with a major libel suit. Would he win? I don't know. But when papers get into the business of muddy accusations and character assassination, there is always a chance that they go too far.

If there was ever anyone who won't go quietly into the gentle night, it is f***ing Alberto. It is clear that there are lawyers involved right now based on the response from Nike.

Kids today are such whiners, almost impossible to coach them. Mary looked chunky out there compared to other runners. If she could have kept her weight under control she could have been a top medal contender.

ijdfijdf wrote:

Jonathan Gault wrote:

Full explanation from this Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/runmarycain/status/1192787550588604417

Wow, all those cut marks visible in that picture, and nobody said anything...

Maybe you as a journalist could ask Cain where she cut herself? Seems like this is something very difficult to hide as an athlete, when you are competing half naked.

this is perhaps one of the most garbage posts on this website this year

She got a 150K for the exclusive rights to her story and a book deal is also in the works. So why dont YOU GET INFORMED.

typical lying LR troll wrote:

Mary The Liar wrote:

She also got a big fat check from the New York Times for her 'story'.

It's not the National Enquirer, they don't pay people for their stories (or to bury their stories). Stop spewing lies.

typical lying LR troll wrote:

Mary The Liar wrote:

She also got a big fat check from the New York Times for her 'story'.

It's not the National Enquirer, they don't pay people for their stories (or to bury their stories). Stop spewing lies.

Wow you’re ignorant about the media