Everybody leaving Bowerman track club?

In other sports people change teams all the time. Honestly there are a lot of pro athletes right now that can improve if they changed coaches or team.

Even an outsider could tell the “Bowerman Babes” was nothing more then a high school mean girls clique. That type of toxic environment will last only so long. But that’s what Nike is all about.

Mentioned in another thread, but the jury is out if Jerry can coach 800/1500m types. It seems like he has more success with strength-based 1500m runner and 5K/10K athletes.

mix it up wrote:

In other sports people change teams all the time. Honestly there are a lot of pro athletes right now that can improve if they changed coaches or team.

Who are the incoming athletes to BTC?

Poster who said Johnson was going to Pete the other week said Lucia Stafford. Solid if true. 4:02.1 before turning 23 is no joke. A 1998 kid like Johnson and Hurta but a faster PR than both coming out of college. Fair to say if she came through the NCAA rather than Canadian collegiate system there would probably be more hype.

https://worldathletics.org/athletes/canada/lucia-stafford-14464956

Who all has left? I am tracking in 2021:

1) Kate Grace

2) Colleen Quigley

3) Marielle Hall

4) Sinclaire Johnson

5) Gwen Jorgenson

Four of those since the Burrito Incident. Anyone else?

Most if not all of these departures clearly would have happened regardless of what's going on with Shelby. It's totally expected to see this sort of turnover after an Olympic year. The training obviously wasn't working for four out of the five women on that list. And the fifth had a contract dispute and found another sponsor who saw more upside in her.

That said, the Houlihan situation clearly doesn't help. The Stafford addition makes sense, but otherwise, you'd normally see BTC sign a new crop of promising collegians going into the trials, and that didn't happen.

It is completely different without Capriotti making the decisions and controlling the purse strings.

Probably because everyone knows NIKE is a doped up embarrassment to honest sport. How could anyone feel good about running for them for that long unless they only believe in themselves?

Why is Shalane running 6 marathons when her athletes are dropping out of their program like flies?

moji wrote:

Why is Shalane running 6 marathons when her athletes are dropping out of their program like flies?

Publicity stunt.

That, and she has no real “coaching” duties to perform.

Athletes leaving every year is expected, what's different this year is that nobody joined

Before Covid, it seemed like they had a realistic shot of potentially placing 8 women in the olympics for Team USA. Quigley and Frerichs SC, Houlihan and Grace 1500, Schweizer and maybe cranny/fraser 5000m, Infeld and Hall 10000m. Then you see Grace and Quigley leave, huge drop-off for Hall and injuries for Fraser and Infeld. The only one who really got better during the past year was Cranny.

They now have a core four of Frerichs, Schweizer, Cranny and GDS. Nowhere near the depth they once had on the women's side. It will be interesting to see if they can still attract the top college talent after the doping bust for Houlihan and poor 2021 performances.

Maybe Shalane dropped out as well. And by doing this she can push the articles about her defending a doper to the last pages of google.

A lot of folks at BTC posted emotional defenses of Shelby on Instagram about her character after she was popped. If I were starting my running career and was actually clean, this wouldn’t sit well with me. It would make it seem like they were either in on it or that they didn’t care about a clean sport. It certainly wouldn’t be somewhere that i thought I could discuss things honestly with my teammates.

Frankly that whole charade was as big a red flag as Shelby getting popped in the first place, IMO.

If you read a few of their interviews, piece the bits together - it all becomes relatively clear and I don't think is (directly) down to Burrito-gate.

It's far more self-centered (and not necessarily in a bad way) than that - around the altitude trip last winter clearly there were some who weren't performing or adapting well at altitude. Hence some came down early. Athletes in a group talk and the narrative was then that if you were with the core group, you were getting the right attention from Jerry but once you moved away from "Plan A". There was no Plan B until you were ready to join Plan A again.

You could even see this in the comments from Johnson about how she was having to adapt to the group and the volume - how she couldn't do all of Shelby's sessions etc.

Athletes like to feel special and it's clear that the group probably got a bit too large and a good proportion of them didn't.

Jerry runs his runners into the ground. It's no surprise their runners eventually move on. I'd be suspicious of the ones who don't, and somehow are able to keep bouncing back.

Turns out we should have been suspicious about Shelby's sustained ability to do so.

I wrote this in the thread about Sinclaire Johnson but it fits even better in here: The exodus from BTC seems not just related to Shelbys drug bust. Many athletes recently have indicated that they were unhappy with Jerrys Training. Look at this article of Marielle Hall on runnings world when she announced that she left. This is pretty damning, she says she was overtrained and when injured they do not give them recovery schedules. There is just the A train and if you can't perform and hop back onto it you are not getting any support. Although she has not left Emily Infeld has said something similar in a recent podcast she did (think Ali on the run). Frankly it is *ridiculous* a coach of Jerrys (and Shalanes) exprience cannot guide athletes back to health from injury. Injuries are so common for runners and managing injured athletes should be daily routine for them. Instead they just seems to overtrain them, which is probably what leads all of them to be injured. Honestly would not surprise me if BTC is done in the grand scheme of things. They were dominating womens distance running in the US and now their athletes can't jump ship fast enough. Here is the parts of the Marielle Hall article:

“It did kind of feel like they weren’t quite sure how to help,” Hall said. “There’s not really plan B for people. There’s plan A. There are not many ways they were offering as alternatives to what the program was. That makes it difficult for anyone.

“The train is always a good analogy,” she continued. “It really doesn’t stop. You’re able to achieve these high peaks and incredible things. Sometimes people get left behind. I think you have to understand that aspect of training. It’s an intense, rigorous environment. I understood that but also know that it doesn’t have to be that way for me personally. There are other ways to train and exist within the sport.”

Full article here:

Yes. There was an Ali on the Run episode with Kate Grace earlier this summer where she basically said Jerry does not cater to individuals. Any interview any of them give, if they are asked about a future decision, they basically say "I have to talk to Jerry." Its like a cult (someone else described that on here and I cannot get it out of my head) and Jerry is the almighty leader and only decision maker. Very odd. He also sent Karissa and Elise back to Park City for a day between the 5 and 10K races at the trials. They gave an interview on Ali on the Run that basically said they did not want to go, had no idea it was coming (I think) and it ended up being a disaster because the 10K got pushed up in time.