GS,
Your math skills appear to be at least adequate, but I’d suggest your reading comprehension needs some work. Yes, I was at CU over 30 years ago, I dropped out of CU and the program in ’88. Thanks for upgrading my resume by telling everybody that I graduated. May I use you as a reference?
I made it clear that I had originally posted after the RW article and my post addressed some inaccuracies and unfair characterizations in that article that I thought needed to be corrected. I also went out of my way to say that I had no direct knowledge of the complainant and said that my comments were based on my extensive contact with the program and personally with Wetmore over a period of years.
I will concede that the article, flawed as it is, does lay out the facts of the case—charges, people involved, next steps, etc. This article currently forms the base of my knowledge about the case and judging by the posts here, the same is true for you and a lot of other people. I would prefer to see objective info from a much more diversified pool of sources, but for the moment, I’m playing the game with the cards I got.
If you live long enough, you get to see history repeat itself. Shortly after I left CU, my coach, the late Jerry Quiller, was pilloried in local media because a female team member accused him being insensitive in a serious matter not related to weight issues. The tropes trotted out that time about the program then were almost the same as the ones dragged out in the RW article—“Win at all costs”, “Sink or swim”. One article I saw would have you believe that Bobby Knight was coaching the CU track team. The writer quoted a few disgruntled CU athletes, whom I knew. They were uniformly immature jerks who never performed up to their potential. For anybody who knew Coach Q, that caricature was laughable and the media quickly found other targets.
It’s different this time, societal norms have shifted and anybody with an axe to grind now has an audience of billions. Institutions like CU, which were famously averse to bad PR in the last century, are now consumed with it, sometimes to their detriment and the detriment of many others. As I understand it, the Ath Dept has an office that actively monitors social media for positive affirmation and I doubt they’re unique in that regard.
You profess to be willing to let the inquiry take its course, I wish I could be as sanguine. When I was a walk-on at CU, I caused a high-profile controversy that unexpectedly became a vital part of my college education. One of the biggest take-aways from that experience was that CU will do what’s best for CU. That’s not to suggest that CU is a singularly evil organization, it’s just the nature of the beast. In this case, good PR and good social media presence will likely factor in their final decision.
I don’t know much about the inquiry, if somebody with real information would care to enlighten me, it would be appreciated. I assume it’s a board of AD staff, lawyers, etc. It appears that they have already interviewed witnesses, perhaps all complaining witnesses, we’re not sure. They will likely interview Wetmore and staff, but it’s not a court of law, there aren’t any defense witnesses, cross-examination, penalty of perjury, etc. The article and CU’s statement mention inquiry results being shared with the public, but I didn’t see anything mentioned about transparency in the decision-making process and I doubt we will. I think it’s entirely possible that the deciders decide something like, “ We’re getting too many down arrows on the Let’s Run MB, let’s fire them”.
If the article presented the facts well enough, it veered away from objectivity when trying to describe the program’s culture and in doing so, made some unfounded and destructive assumptions. As I watched this article being parroted verbatim by other outlets without additional context or other opinions, it appeared that Wetmore, Borroughs & staff were on the precipice of being tried and convicted by the court of public opinion. So I provided a counter-narrative where the “culture” of the program is concerned.
The writer seemed to have formed her opinion of the CU team culture entirely from critics of the program. Has she ever attended any meets and watched Wetmore & Burroughs coach? Was she sitting next to Wetmore when he gave pre-race instructions to Jenny Barringer (Simpson) before her first steeple at Mt SAC? Was she trackside with Wetmore while he coached Shayla Kipp through her first Mt SAC? How many times has she visited Boulder and rode with Wetmore and the team out east of town for the Sunday long run? Did she spend any time with Mark and Heather and got to know them as people away from the track? Obviously, the writer had physical limitations in writing a magazine article, but that’s no excuse for making assumptions based on sketchy information.
To address arguments raised in your reply lest you continue to operate under the misconception that they were unassailable:
As to number of complaining athletes versus time frame, I must make a correction. I said that there were 3 former athletes complaining and relative to the number of athletes cycling through the program since ’17, that was a favorable comment for Wetmore. I was wrong, the article mentions 4 athletes complaining. The 4th was a male runner whom I was not familiar with, but the article said he was there through ’20. If you’re saying I used a too-broad time frame, I would point to this as proving that my original statistical analysis remains valid. If you’re still inclined to pursue the silliness of a numbers game, I would finally point to 44 former athletes for the program against less than 20 against.
The complaint is abusive conduct in pursuit of body composition issues, not a HIPAA violation. The article mentions one possible HIPAA violation and that might be part of the complaint, but if violating HIPPAA law is driving this, wouldn’t that compel legal action?
At the end of the day, none of us was in the room when the alleged events took place, so it comes down to who get’s the benefit of the doubt? People whom I’ve come to know, admire and respect or somebody I never heard of? We have the opportunity to make that choice. Absent convincing evidence otherwise, I’ve made mine.
Thanks for your attention.