8yhoieg'sbijs wrote:
I'm a female British runner. My take on this is that everyone, including her parents, pushed a child athlete too hard, but that Mary Cain has also learned to be a whiner and an attention seeker, rather than a hard working athlete.
She is just one of many, many top juniors not to make it as a senior. I'm not a fan of the American school and college system, where so much attention is heaped on very young athletes and they race very frequently and hard. However, I don't think Mary Cain has what it takes to succeed on a senior level to Olympic and World standard. She lacks the dedicated, focussed mindset, the ability to deal with all of the usual issues that elite athletes must cope with, such as maintaining as low a weight as her body will sustain, and injuries. I suspect she was already hard trained and at her peak at age 17. She got used to winning against athletes who were not so physically mature and hard trained as herself and thinks the senior ranks should be as easy.
There are many British junior athletes who have run amazing times who have not gone whining to the national press when they failed to progress as seniors. The fact that Mary Cain's mother is encouraging her to do so isn't great. I guess they are both getting mileage out of the "I used to be the fastest girl in America" thing. But that title is meaningless. We don't have Olympics for girls in America. Many athletes fail. Its interesting that this has come out now that Salazar has gone down, its almost as if they are milking the sympathy bandwagon.
That video she posted, where she was shuffling, hunch shouldered, getting dropped, was unbelievable. Why post something like that, if not for attention/to make people feel sorry for you? It almost looked a little bit faked, so woe-is-me was her posture.
There are lots of American runners who are equally as irritating. Kara Goucher for one, who decided to have a baby at her peak. Sara Hall, while not so irritating, wasted her twenties to a great extent. I have heard so much vitriol on here about certain British female 800m runners, who have run in nearly every Olympic and World Championships final in the recent past, not being "successful" enough. Yet they are out there doing their best in the championships, year in, year out.
Its unfortunate the focus on female runners' weight. But athletes do have to be very lean to be at their best. Any coach will tell you that. Its nothing new, nothing specific to Salazar. Mary Cain, at last sight on her video, had a noticeable pot belly, and that's something that would concern many mid twenties women, never mind a supposedly elite level athlete. She does not have the look of someone who is half starved, or who has had insufficient nutrients to grow - she could easily pass for 28. She actually looks like someone who matured very early and was at her best when she was stronger and lighter than her contemporaries.