June 3, 2015
Salazar’s Impending Judgment: God Writes Straight with Blurred Lines?
“It doesn’t surprise me at all about the doping allegations,” my friend, a biochemist and exercise scientist wrote. “There is always a fine line between necessary prescription medication and performance enhancing drugs.”
This reply came earlier this morning as the running world lit up with the scandalous but less-than-surprising news that David Epstein, a former ESPN reporter, and the BBC were teaming up on a forthcoming documentary about Alberto Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project, an elite training unit featuring the oft-accused Galen Rupp and Mo Farah.
This lack of surprise came to me from someone who has made a practice of researching many of the same performance enhancing substances and techniques Salazar, Rupp and Farah are accused of using. It became public knowledge a few months ago that Salazar had ordered massive amounts of L-Carnitine in an effort to boost the performance of his athletes, even going so far as to test it on the same former assistant who is now a key witness in the allegations of blurring the rules. My friend and I had often discussed the potential benefits of L-Carnitine, a substance he had used and tested briefly in his own elite-level training.
Not only L-Carnitine, but testosterone (in gel and patch form), DHEA, and even sublingually administered HGH (human growth hormone) were among the substances my friend had researched and tested in a non-professional, non-competitive setting. I even went so far as to consult a board-certified endocrinologist about the merits and effects of these substances with regard to running performance. Of course, all this was out of interest, but was in part facilitated by the slowly evolving rumors about the activities of Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project.
Now, before rushing to judgment about whether or not Salazar, Rupp, Farah, and other Nike Oregon Project athletes broke the rules, perhaps more compelling is the dichotomy between the lack of surprise voiced by athletes, coaches, and followers of the sport of distance running and the “we’ve never had an athlete test positive” mantra of Salazar’s elusive group. If we take Salazar at his word, he is an Olympian, an innovator, a champion, a beloved coach, a patriot, and a devout Catholic who pursues his goals with a relentless fury and dedication.
Yes, if we take Salazar at his word, he is a driven man with a weak heart who is doing everything within his power to pursue success in a mission that he views as sacred. Salazar’s mission is from God, and his inexorable pursuit of a pharmaceutical advantage is perhaps, in his own words, evidence “that God is at work even in the midst of our human imperfection and mortality.”
“I believe that it is currently difficult to be among the top 5 in the world in any of the distance events without using EPO or Human Growth Hormone. While some of the top athletes may be clean, so many athletes are running so fast that their performances are suspect.” These were the words of Alberto Salazar in a 1999 speech delivered at Duke University. The title of Alberto’s talk was Locating the Line Between Acceptable Performance Enhancement and Cheating.
The story of Alberto’s frustration with the lack of competitive American (non-African) distance runners on the international scene – and on the medal podium at World Championship and Olympic events – is one of legend. His creation of the Nike Oregon Project some twenty years ago kicked off a wave of innovation and experimentation that began with Soviet-made treatment machines and techniques, careful monitoring of his athlete’s vital signs, rigorous training, and even a house in Portland that was sealed to provide a hypoxic environment to simulate living at altitude, a generally accepted advantage of many African runners.
“Try drinking beers at 10,000 feet,” said the former University of Oregon athlete during our visit to the Nike Oregon Project House. As we walked into the downstairs recreation room, we were greeted by a Zimbabwean athlete with a 13:14.50 5000m personal best stretched out across the sofa. We might have been in the basement of any typical college house, except we were hanging out at 10,000 feet – some 2,000 feet above the highest point in Kenya, a height at which altitude sickness is a distinct possibility.
The drive of the athletes living in the house at that time was undeniable. They were getting serious work done the old fashioned way, by lacing up their shoes and training like animals. They were sleeping at altitude, a practice which Alberto Salazar introduced to Galen Rupp when Galen was in high school, roughly the same time period Alberto is alleged to have given Rupp testosterone. An early member of the Nike Oregon Project commented that Alberto’s “tinkering” was a “little weird” and that Salazar was a bit of a “mad scientist” but no one questioned his devotion.
Alberto Salazar has long been a man devoted to both running and making the most of the life that has been given to him. His battle with Dick Beardsley in the 1982 Boston Marathon is known as the race in which Salazar pushed himself so hard that he had to be given last rites by a Catholic priest. After this race, his body rebelled. A compromised immune system, an inability to perform at a world-class level, and ensuing anxiety set Salazar back and abruptly ended his impact on the international running scene.
Frustrated, injured, and unable to train at an elite level, Salazar sought solace in the two realms that appear to be alive and well in his life some thirty years later – his faith in God and his faith in pharmaceuticals. Fueled by Prozac, a relatively new drug, Salazar found new life. Only days after beginning Prozac treatment, “Salazar’s chronic fatigue had lifted, his training pace had accelerated by over 30 seconds per mile, and the Oregon-based runner had plunged into a series of 40-mile workouts, carried out with relative ease.”
Salazar experienced a physical and chemical awakening, and went on to win the 1994 Comrades Marathon, a legendary 53.75 mile race in South Africa. After nearly dropping out, Salazar returned to the course, praying the rosary out loud. Upon finishing, Salazar exclaimed to stunned reporters, “It was a miracle. I should not have finished at all. The Lord did it.” The man who once struggled to run 7:30 miles in practice was now able to run two 2:44 marathons back to back – a sporting feat perhaps more miraculous than Maradona’s “hand of God” goal in the 1986 World Cup.
Even years after the fact, Alberto humbly attributes his Comrades victory to God. “There’s no doubt in my mind that God did it, because I did everything wrong. It gives me a lot of peace about the future – whether or not I ever run another race-when I remember how I wasn’t running only on my own power in the Comrades’ Race.”
While scientific research doesn’t concretely link Prozac to increases in running performance, Salazar’s willingness to try Prozac and attribute it to his enhanced performance and subsequent rebirth as an elite runner is significant. Having reached a performance ceiling, similar to the frustration he felt when observing American distance runners being dominated by Africans prior to founding the Nike Oregon Project, Alberto turned to innovation, pharmaceutical experimentation and faith in God.
The questions regarding misuse of prescription medication that first hit the mainstream press in a 2013 article in The Wall Street Journal have now spawned a whole series of unseemly revelations.
Did Alberto really hide testosterone gel under clothes in a room he shared with Rupp and then lie to his physiotherapist about it?
Was Rupp doping with testosterone at age 16 under Alberto’s supervision, as claimed by former Nike Oregon Project assistant coach Steve Magness?
Can we really believe that Mo Farah’s indoor 2-mile world record, set shortly after posting images on Instagram of himself training and hanging out with a convicted doper, was set without pharmaceutical manipulation?
These are questions that have emerged as Alberto’s name has been mentioned in the same breath as that of Lance Armstrong.
How is it possible that a seemingly principled man, a champion, a role model, and a famous employee of all-American corporation Nike has been linked to egregious acts of deceit, dishonesty, and doping?
Perhaps we can look back at Salazar’s life experience and his own words and trace a relentless desire to win at all costs. In the second half of his life, Salazar re-discovered his faith in God, a faith that seemingly allowed him to uncover a pharmaceutical edge.
Perhaps it is this combination of competitive fire, belief in miracles, and “why not try it” attitude that allowed Salazar to transform a lanky 14 year-old soccer player at Central Catholic High School in Portland into the American record holder in the 10,000 meters, an Olympic silver medalist, and the fastest non-African man on the planet a little over a decade later.
Does this mean Salazar is guilty as charged? Travis Tygart, head of the World Anti-Doping Association, will likely be faced with the task of exploring this question in great – and potentially grave – detail in the coming months, much as he did with Lance Armstrong.
Back in 2010, I tried to contact Alberto Salazar and Galen Rupp, both professing Roman Catholics, to speak to cross country and track and field athletes at Bishop Blanchet High School, a Catholic school in Seattle. I had hoped that they might share their thoughts about the desire to maximize one’s potential as a runner and how this is inextricably linked with their Catholic faith.
I left a voicemail at Nike, and spoke to an employee there, but I never followed up and neither did Salazar. Personally, I’d like to think he and Galen Rupp have operated within the rules. However, given Salazar’s words of 1999 at Duke University, I wonder if he hasn’t somehow convinced himself that his mission to put Rupp on the Olympic podium in London (and all it took to get there) is God’s will.
Any athlete that has a great desire to be his or her best will do whatever it takes within his or her own value system. This often becomes very difficult for an athlete when he or she realizes that by sticking with one’s values that they may put themselves at a distinct disadvantage when competing against others with different or looser values.
I believe that it is currently difficult to be among the top 5 in the world in any of the distance events without using EPO or Human Growth Hormone. While some of the top athletes may be clean, so many athletes are running so fast that their performances are suspect.
If the true aim of drug testing is to insure the health of athletes, then there should be greater flexibility in allowing athletes with a medical condition that requires medical treatment to be treated with the drug of choice for that condition regardless of whether or not it is banned.
I often wonder how I would handle this problem now.
– Alberto Salazar, Locating the Line Between Acceptable Performance Enhancement and Cheating, Duke University, 1999
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