Disclaimer: I don't follow competitive running very closely, and I don't really care about its ultimate fate.
But am I crazy that this whole sport feels like a massive incestuous joke? Nike pulling strings and de facto guiding the future of the sport. Like maybe there's no smoking gun, but there's all this BS. Maybe it's a good thing for the powerful people in the sport that it's not on many people's radars. Otherwise there'd be constant stories like "hey did you notice how Nike is handling this accusations about salazar", "hey isn't it weird that shelby seems to still somehow be associated with her former team", "isn't it weird that one man (Lannanna) could suggest a world championship event be held in NikeTown, and the entire bureaucracy would ditch the selection process and listen to him", "isn't it weird that the coach of this convicted doper claimed not to know what the commonly abused drug was, then took a job as a college coach at NikeUniversity and brought another nike-affiliated coach on board?"
This all feels like clown world to me. It feels like there are a few key decision makers who get together at a frickin ranch retreat every so often and plot out the future of pro running, and it has so much to do with their egos and their own pet projects and interests. Next it will be an influential old dude hand-picking an athlete who doesn't make it out of the olympic trials to represent the US, because they think that person is just the better option. Like how absurd do things get?