Explosive New York Times article: Mary Cain breaks silence about NOP

These allegations mirror what Tyler Hamilton said about cycling with Lance. Same doctors telling you that you’re fat (until, in his case, your armholes had skintight fabric flapping).

He gives all the stats (massive training to lose 10 pounds, plus a minor increase in output)). Difference is he mentions fatal or near-fatal consequences in a couple of cases.

"It all comes down to one thing: Where were the parents?

In this situation, it sounds like they spoke up and saved her from a terrible situation. AS gets paid to make fast runners and win gold medals. He is not a dad. He is not a pharmacist. He is not a doctor.

AS should have stuck to coaching.

But at a certain point weight is going to come into the picture. If you're not lean, you're going to lose. At a certain point a pro coach needs to be able to discuss weight with his athletes. I am not sure when that is.

18 is young, but it is an adult. Boys can get shot in the head for the USA at 18.

This is just all so disappointing."

Let's get real!

1) Any coach has a duty of care for his athletes. Maybe only for an hour a day training session but parents would expect a coach to know what he/she is doing and that they would not do anything to harm their child.

2) Salazar may not have been a woman but he surely knew that what Cain was going through with regard to her periods etc. was not in the best interests of her long term health. Cain states that she "broke five bones". A bit of a vague statement but if only some of these were running related fractures shouldn't a well informed coach have asked "why?" and thought about diet, periods etc.?

3) Publically berating any athlete (male or female) about their weight is surely not acceptable. If such a delicate subject is to be discussed, and some would say that no subject is off limits between coach and athlete, it should be done in private in a calm, measured manner.

4) There is a two way street here; Cain wanted to be the best athlete in the world, Salazar wanted another jewel in his many studded coaching crown (and Nike wanted to make a huge amount of money out of Cain). But it goes back to the duty of care. Universities do have some responsibility towards their students; they don't just say, well, they chose to be here, nobody forced them to come.

5) Did Nike and Salazar "cross the line"? It all depends, I suppose, where you draw the line. But I suspect that most people not on Nike's payroll would agree that if only half of what Cain says is true they didn't just cross the line but took a running jump and cleared it by a country mile!

Jgt11 wrote:

To get any Olympic/wc medal your going to have to enter the territory of unhealthy. Bekele was eating only 2k calories a day when getting back in shape for the marathon. With women it's even riskier and you have to account for this in diet/training.

Completely right - many elite athletes are known for eating extremely low amounts of calories.

Evan Jager shared his nutrition plan for 2 training weeks - his lunch usually consisted of 1 or 2 slices of toast. No wonder he is able to stay at 140 lbs as 6'2" guy!

Jan Frodeno, best triathlete/Ironman in the world, says that he only drinks a coffee as a breakfast and goes straight into his first, very long training session. He also says he doesn't eat stuff like pasta because it would make him gain weight. He is also incredibly lean despite being VERY tall (still very muscular, since he does swimming/weights/biking, but almost no fat).

There are exceptions - like Jordan Hasay said she is eating 5,000 calories a day, which either means that NOP has found some drugs that allow someone to eat ridiculous amounts AND still lose weight somehow, OR she is severely overestimating how much she eats/wants to portray a different image than reality (eating 5,000 sounds better than eating 1,700).

Oh hai Alberto.

Was the intent to push Mary and maybe some others until they became and easy targets for selling the thyroid meds?

Where were her parents on this?! Why did they allow her to go to NOP? Why did they feel the need to push a HS KID into the pro ranks? What did they expect to happen? Are the parents glory hounds hoping their daughter was going to be the next Zola Bud? I don’t understand why they felt the need to push her into the pro ranks has a HS KID... the smart move would’ve been to let her develop naturally in college, not rush the process and then, when she was more mature and had some years under belt let her go pro... BUT NO, her parents allowed her to jump into the pro ranks and go with a group has had “shady” written all over it LONG before she joined the group.

At the same time, the whole Nike program should be burned to the ground. If the reports are true, Nike deserves all the vitriol it’s bound to get over this. Is anyone actually shocked that the man nicknamed “Albuterol Saladbar” was pressuring his athletes into eating disorders? Disgusting!

asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf wrote:

- Salazar's regimen was a poor fit for Cain. But Salazar's regimen works well for other women.

- In the future, Nike needs to factor PR catastrophes into the risk they take when selecting their training methods. The flops airing their grievances (1) hurt Nike's brand and (2) hurt Nike's recruitment of other star athletes.

Exactly this.

To Phil and other talking about the link of weight loss and performance and how it is a two-sided issue-it's not. Training methodology isn't a binary decision. As a coach myself I consider adaptation to be part of my responsibility to my athletes, I don't think Androgel Salazar was flexible enough with Mary. This is what happens when you work for an organization that has a stranglehold on the sport-you can enact these policies and keep the survivors. Very lazy approach when it comes to the human element. If NOP paid more attention maybe they wouldn't need to administer all that thyroid medication

HOOWIE wrote:

Same thing is happening to Jordan Hasay. I understand their may be some logic in being as light as possible to run fast but when these girls are habitually running until their bones break you would think it would be ok to let them eat a piece of pizza. Al can't even get his two athletes to the line healthy.

it's not just nop. excessive weight restriction, loss of periods, and broken bones are a frequent problem for female endurance athletes.

sdasdasdasdasds wrote:

I'm not buying it. Sounds like a privileged white girl who has had all the advantages in the world, and when things didn't go her way (injuries, burnout, etc) she blames coaches and Nike.

Come on, shills! How many athletes and coaches need to testify before you consider the possibility that Salazar, Brown, and NOP were rotten to the core. We've known about their misuse of Levoxyl seemingly forever. (See the 2017 NYT article and Ritz allegations for a reminder.)

Is there any doubt that NOP has done exactly what Mary says: pushes drugs so athletes can maintain unhealthy weights? Call it grey area if you want, but Levoxyl requires a prescription, which only the banned Dr. Brown seems to have been willing to give. At the very least, the drug use should leave you unimpressed with the accomplishments of the NOP featherweights.

My son runs for a D-1 program and in the space of a year, he's had two stress fractures. I don't blame, the coach, the program or his diet as I know all are solid. He's gotten injured because he's young and he's pushing his body harder than it can go. That's what makes him special as a runner and it is, unfortunately, problematic. Mary Cain was not running for some local college. She was running at the highest level. The people that dominate this realm live at altitude in Africa, eat very little, have no psychiatrists or doctors on staff and yet they crush Americans year after year. Some of it's doping but when you get over there, you quickly see they are just so much harder than we are here in the States.

Given the current climate, this video hits all the touchpoints that will get the "Amen" chorus to rise to their feet. But it's half a truth. Is Alberto batshit crazy? Pretty close. Are there any athletes that have succeeded in his program? More than any other American program out there. Are some of them female? Yup. Are they really thin? Yup. Just like the Africans.

Mary Cain's story is a sad one and should not be dismissed. But the headline here is not that her coaches were unresponsive to her personal struggles but that she turned to them before she turned to her parents. If you're a mother or a father and you're honest with yourself, you should realize that Mary Cain has a big part of the story she's not sharing.

RunRaider wrote:

Cain also says here that Alberto pushed her to take prescription drugs against IAAF rules, same as is alleged by Kara Goucher.

We’re supposed to believe that Alberto pushed this on several NOP athletes and none of them ever took him up on it? Give me a break.

?? MF THIS!!!

A little before my time. Not sure when AS ran that 2 mile but recall article it was 9 flat hand timed . Ratcliffe ran 8:59.x his senior year which rounds up to 9 flat but as a rule supersedes AS handtime as new state record.

Not really though wrote:

Win at all costs because the coach wanted her to lose weight? Imagine a coach at the highest level of the sport not being able to tell his athlete she’s too heavy. That’s where track has reached. And people wonder why Track is dying and not taken seriously. This isn’t high school or college, this is professional sports. Did she really think she could sign a professional contract and then gain weight and underperform and nobody would say anything?

She underperformed BECAUSE of what was going on, was that lost on you? All these men commenting on this are so f*ing ignorant. I hope none of you have daughters and I feel bad for all of your wives (assuming any females actually put up with you). I knew reading these comments would be bad because this website is full of disgusting trolls but this is truly next level. It's such a shame because she was soooo talented. If only she had gone somewhere else with another coach there is no telling how many medals she could have. So the "win at all costs" didn't really work out, did it? We need more female coaches.

It's not just females.

I ran D1 and often received comments on my weight. I was far from fat, but also didn't look like a pro 10K runner. I was running very high mileage (over 100mpw) and had very little body fat, but I retained muscle in my arms and upper body. I think I was about 140 and 5'10". I looked very lean without a shirt, ribs all over the place, but was still encouraged to watch my weight.

I remember one evening after running 18 miles for the day: 7 mile morning run and a 11 miles worth of afternoon mileage on a hard track workout day. I went to a Subway and felt guilty about getting a turkey sandwich with no cheese and nothing fattening on it. I felt fat after I ate it, and went home and told myself that I am a 20 year old man who feels guilty about a turkey sandwich after an 18 mile day - something has to change.

I know very few male college runners with normal relationships to food. I think this story is important to tell, but to act like it isn't a wider problem outside of Nike is just ignorant. What is the answer? I don't know.

all of this ignores the very serious fact that she was having suicidal thoughts and was cutting herself and people saw her cutting herself and she told people she was cutting herself and no one did a thing about it. if you think pushing someone to the point of being suicidal is worth it to be the fastest runner then your priorities are borked. Efraimson isn't complaining her high school coach ruined her because her high school coach didn't drive her to cutting herself.

"which either means that NOP has found some drugs that allow someone to eat ridiculous amounts AND still lose weight somehow"

I mean thyroid meds and L-Carnitine both help burn fat.

Was with you till the last paragraph. Great post nonetheless.

douglas burke wrote:

Apparently they Took Away Salazar's School Records at his High School after he was suspended, I know he ran under 9 Minutes for 2 Miles, but it does not show up.

https://ma.milesplit.com/teams/19416-wayland-high-school/records#.XcQYoFVKjX4

They didn’t take it away it’s just not up there, milesplit doesn’t have everything.

He ran an 8:57 indoors

14:04 5000 outdoors