Athletics West Coach Dick Brown (Admitted to AW Athletes Being on Steroids but) told Suzy Favor she didn't need to dope

Thank you so much Craig and malmo. I had been a huge fan of AW since it's inception. In high school, my friends wanted to play in the NFL or be a rock star. I wanted to run for AW. Unfortunately, info about my favorite team was hard to come by. A few magazine articles here and there maybe. Just reading these two wonderful posts 30 years later gave more inside info than I ever knew. I have always wished someone would write a book about the history of AW beginning to mysterious end.

The video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih9rLfQIeBo

fred wrote:

World Cross 1980

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYr-anCd300

On my intervals today I imagined I was Craig chasing down those two dudes.

Barabbas wrote:

Thank you so much Craig and malmo. I had been a huge fan of AW since it's inception. In high school, my friends wanted to play in the NFL or be a rock star. I wanted to run for AW. Unfortunately, info about my favorite team was hard to come by. A few magazine articles here and there maybe. Just reading these two wonderful posts 30 years later gave more inside info than I ever knew. I have always wished someone would write a book about the history of AW beginning to mysterious end.

Kind of like this too, but heard some things by the mid 1980s. Some more in the 90s and 00s. And now it's really out there.

Not too long ago had an evening with a couple long time former Nike runners from that era (not AW) and only corroborated much of what's been coming out here in the past year or two.

fred wrote:

World Cross 1980

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYr-anCd300

Thanks for posting that link - hadn't seen it before. Good thing for Virgin that Yifter wasn't in the race.

Dkny64 wrote:

fred wrote:

World Cross 1980

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYr-anCd300

Thanks for posting that link - hadn't seen it before. Good thing for Virgin that Yifter wasn't in the race.

Good thing for Yifter that Yifter wasn't in that race. Virgin beat him in 81 WXC.

Great read. Thanks.

This is a little off the subject of the thread, but the choice of Harry Johnson coaching AW seems crazy in retrospect. He was basically a glorified high school PE teacher. From what I understand he was really good at observing his kids in his PE classes and encouraging them to get into T&F events that they could excel at. Maybe that is taken for granted now but I don't think any HS coach really did that back in the 70s. I believe that was a part of why South Eugene High School established a dynasty back then. Although obviously being right next door to the UofO didn't hurt either. What possessed somebody to think Johnson could go from High School to coaching world elite athletes is beyond me. Except maybe there wasn't anyone else and Johnson was hired by default because he lived in Eugene. Bowerman was retired and Dellinger was focused on the UofO.

It goes to show that coaching mature, elite distance runners today is light years ahead of what it was 30 years ago. As Craig illustrates, basically nobody knew that the hell they were doing back then. Or if someone did they had near zero resources to build on it. A systematic approach to developing elite distance runners post college seems to have been virtually non existent back then.

Whether you believe Salazar has engaged in doping or not, it is something you have to factor if you are questioning his success today.

As it turns out, Craig knew what he was doing. As I recall from my HS fan days, upon leaving AW, he moved back to Lebanon, sat down, and wrote down everything he knew and thought he needed to know in a document called something like "How to Be a World-Class Runner". We see how that worked out for him.

I wonder if it isn't a coincidence that most of the top US distance runners of the 80s -- Salazar, Virgin, Nenow, and Bickford (10k bias here) -- did their best running by settling down in a place that was comfortable and provided support and trained. Any up-and-coming elite types who might be lurking should think about this.

Great posts, thanks guys.

Just a note or two to follow-up:

I was there (at the AW building) the day Drenth died, while several people tried to resuscitate him. It was awful. I didn't know him that well, but he seemed like a great guy, and unlikely to be taking any PEDs or pursuing other risky maneuvers (blood packing, which may have been passe by then). He was coached by Sevene (as was I), who was strongly anti-PEDs, at least in all his dealings with me.

True, as my handle here says, I was a fringe player - got coaching, travel, stuff, but no stipend. Not quite part of the inner circle. So maybe I was left out of the loop. But there were people who raised my suspicion, and Jeff Drenth was NOT one of them. I was told there was a full toxicology report as part of his autopsy and nothing was found - officially, his death was presumed to be related to an existing arrhythmia.

Also, I don't recall any fire at the AW headquarters. But I do recall that they sent some Nike honchos down (shortly after Jeff's death). They closed up shop really quickly. We were told it was to "save" all the equipment (shoes & gear), but of course there were rumors....

Defiant wrote:

The video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih9rLfQIeBo

My video captures the essence of AW.

Great read Malmo and Craig. Thank you for taking the time to post.

I'm not sure of the exact dates, but I think it was only a short time after he left AW that Craig ran for the St. Louis Track Club - circa 1979-1981??? (I was pretty young then, so not certain of the dates). They don't any longer, but the StL Track Club used to have age group and gender records for every distance you could think of posted on their website. As you can imagine, our club's male 20-24 (maybe 25-29) records for the 5,000 and 10,000 were pretty fast....

Thanks for the take, Craig.

If you think about all you heard behind the scenes in Eugene back then, you'd realize that Dellinger was both over-training Oregon athletes, and had ruined his relationship with Bowerman, Knight, and Nike. So, there is no way your "wondering" could have ever come true. Very few Oregon athletes actually stayed with Dellinger's coaching after they graduated.

There is absolutely no way Nike would have ever considered Dellinger. Hollister knew Dellinger was effing up athletes, and why, as did Bowerman.

Geis had the right idea.

If memory serves he was originally a gymnastics coach, who turned his attention to running.

HJ should get credit for creating a culture and a program where kids wanted to run, and a feeder program with junior high schools. He was a good leader of young high schoolers, he got the kids to be true believers that if they did what he said, they would succeed...and a lot of them did, but few did anything after college, except B. McChesney.

Hanger-on, you were at AW hq when Drenth died, yet you have no knowledge of the fire right around the same time in 1986? Normally I'd call bullshit here, but I really believe that you did miss this one. Perhaps you could try Registrr Guard archives, or let me do the work for you and I'll see if i can get a copy of the fire report. That was big news back then. Suspiciously enough the fire only destroyed paper records. How convenient?

no chance dellnger wrote:

Very few Oregon athletes actually stayed with Dellinger's coaching after they graduated.

That's a very odd thing to say, and catagorically false. Could you elaborate?

I didn't mean to come off negative about HJ. Its just that he should have been taken for what he was. A good HS PE teacher and t&f coach. But its not even clear to me how good of distance coach he was at the high school level. As I said, what he did was identify kids who had a talent for distance running and then had them get on a training program. That alone was probably enough to make his high school a distance powerhouse in Oregon in the 70s. That is before you even get to the question of whether he knew how to coach and advise on those training programs. The McChesney brothers were mainly coached by their father from what I understand.

malmo wrote:

Hanger-on, you were at AW hq when Drenth died, yet you have no knowledge of the fire right around the same time in 1986? Normally I'd call bullshit here, but I really believe that you did miss this one. Perhaps you could try Registrr Guard archives, or let me do the work for you and I'll see if i can get a copy of the fire report. That was big news back then. Suspiciously enough the fire only destroyed paper records. How convenient?

The timeline:

4/20/1986 5:12 PM Eugene Fire/ Police Athletics West 3968 West 13 th Ave. Bill Jennings, Robert Spinks

6/2/1986 Jeff Drenth died

7/11/1986 AW Closes

Barabbas wrote:

Thank you so much Craig and malmo. I had been a huge fan of AW since it's inception. In high school, my friends wanted to play in the NFL or be a rock star. I wanted to run for AW. Unfortunately, info about my favorite team was hard to come by. A few magazine articles here and there maybe. Just reading these two wonderful posts 30 years later gave more inside info than I ever knew. I have always wished someone would write a book about the history of AW beginning to mysterious end.

What HS runner didn't dream of running for AW?

Didn't Shelley Steely also run for Dick Brown?