Mary Cain, her father, Ritz, Julian and others talk in-depth with Sports Illustrated includes Salazar's full statement

Why do the specialists have to be women in order to understand how they work. Aren't most obgyn men?

NOP staff are like chiropractors who call themselves doctors but never went to medical school.

Words matter wrote:

How can we have a productive conversation about this when the word toxic is used in the headline. SI has obviously taken sides. Any rational conversation needs to acknowledge that weight is an important determinant of success in top levels of sport, and that elite training is very hard and sometimes unforgiving even if no malice is intended.

+1000

... she (Mary Cain) was told to lose weight and that by doing so she would be more successful.

“I was told I was too fat and ‘had the biggest butt on the starting line’,” Yoder Begley (25th in Beijing 2008 with 32:38.28, after two dopers were DQ'd)

I can't think it was just weight here. Yoder Begley was almost 9% behind Dibaba, and I don't think she was 9% overweight. Still, she conceivably could have been more successful by being best USA woman, by beating Goucher (30:55.16 in 9th after the doping DQs). That's within the weight loss regime contigency.

Also AFAIK, no one has factually disputed that she had the biggest butt on the starting line. It's how they feel about such facts that is dominating Twitter.

On bored wrote:

Lurker wrote:

In a statement, Treasure said: “‘Psychologist’ is a term associated with a state-licensed practitioner. I have never been or practiced as a licensed psychologist. There is no such thing as a ‘licensed sport psychologist.’ My background and training is in sport psychology. …

Please read the article before responding...

It's almost like the NOP-haters want to intentionally miss the facts.

Dr. Renée Pirkl (a licensed psychologist),

Nike said in a statement, “We are not aware of the specific staff that you say Alberto referenced.” In his statement to SI, Salazar named three experts who he said were available to his athletes as resources. Cain does not recall working with any of those specialists.

hui65 wrote:

chavez is a slow hobby jogger. he should write some articles from RW how to gallowalk a half 'thon

You sound jealous.

“I would tell Alberto, ‘You can’t talk to kids about this stuff (weight). It’s a problem.’

Yes, that's the problem with kids these days, is that they often can't be talked to directly. I'm glad Dr. Cain realized this too.

In a nut-shell, Alberto was using 80s style coaching to achieve peak performance, when FBOW Millennials need a different approach. Maybe using gameification as a weight loss incentive, merge it in with social media somehow, that's the modern ticket.

SFH fan wrote:

“I would tell Alberto, ‘You can’t talk to kids about this stuff (weight). It’s a problem.’

Yes, that's the problem with kids these days, is that they often can't be talked to directly. I'm glad Dr. Cain realized this too.

In a nut-shell, Alberto was using 80s style coaching to achieve peak performance, when FBOW Millennials need a different approach. Maybe using gameification as a weight loss incentive, merge it in with social media somehow, that's the modern ticket.

Name a coach in the 80 who was like Alberto. Go.

On bored wrote:

It's almost like the NOP-haters want to intentionally miss the facts.

Dr. Renée Pirkl (a licensed psychologist),

So how was NOP like a "cult" like the article claims? I read the entire thing and didn't see support for the cult claim.

Also Alberto praises Cain's, "her underlying message that elite coaching needs more women is a good one"

And I'm not a NOP hater. I want a rebrand with Pete as head coach, Hassan joining that group and her and KoKo going on a rampage in the coming years.

Also, in the 80s if someone called you fat you could get physically violent. Us snowflake millenials can't react anymore thanks to the PC culture the boomers CREATED. So we are just suppose to be subservient peasants.

Bingo.

The SI 2013 article was fairly good at predicting the future for the "17 year old breakout star" (2013 IAAF world champs, 4:07.19 1500m, 10th place)

The specters of burnout and physical maturity hang over Cain, as they do for all young female runners; there is a long list of those who have gone fast early—though none as fast as Cain—and struggled later. Lauren Fleshman, 31, a Stanford graduate and two-time U.S. 5,000-meter champion, is frequently queried on her website by young women seeking to deal with physical changes that slow their careers. "As a female, it's a long road," says Fleshman. "When you're young, your hormonal profile is more like a guy, more testosterone and less estrogen. Your strength-to-weight ratio is incredible. But you can't fight nature forever. Very, very few women escape a few years of fighting their bodies. Mary is an incredible talent. Probably works her butt off. She's going to have a great, long career, and she will have some challenges and injuries along the way."

SFH fan wrote:

“I would tell Alberto, ‘You can’t talk to kids about this stuff (weight). It’s a problem.’

Yes, that's the problem with kids these days, is that they often can't be talked to directly. I'm glad Dr. Cain realized this too.

In a nut-shell, Alberto was using 80s style coaching to achieve peak performance, when FBOW Millennials need a different approach. Maybe using gameification as a weight loss incentive, merge it in with social media somehow, that's the modern ticket.

The issue with Cain isn't about toughness. Any serious runner is willing to put in mileage and run intervals. Rather, It's whether Salazar pushed her to lose an unhealthy amount of weight. If what Magness said in a NY Daily News article is true, Salazar might have been extremely negligent in what he asked Cain to do:

Steve Magness was an assistant coach for the Oregon Project at the beginning of the decade; much of the evidence behind Salazar’s suspension is that he illegally doped Magness to see if a certain supplement was effective. He said Thursday night that Salazar was obsessed with getting an unnamed NOP athlete to lose weight despite lab data saying it would be unsafe for her to do so. “I don’t care what the science says! Her butt is too big," Magness says Salazar told him.

ventolin ^4 wrote:

they expose the fallacies most runners have about health. we all think we're our own doctors since we've constantly dealt with nagging injury and illnesses, and we often exacerbate our health states with the bunk theories we develop.

alsal basically did the same sh!t any of us plebs do, but exported his silly runner theories to an entire team and most definitely ruined some careers. combine his bunk science with his terrible personality, and you had a disaster waiting to happen.

Classic case of a square peg in a round hole. And listen people; I get it that she joined a 'professional' running group and training is hard, yada yada, we are all a bunch of tough-guy-know-it alls, I get it. But getting your damn athlete to the starting line would be a good start for American distance runners who only race twice a year as it is.

The 2013 Cain data (5'6" 113 lbs) BMI is 18.2, which is just under the "normal" (18.5 to 24.9) for the normal population. You'd have to think that Elite Athletes involved in a weighty endeavor would typically be greater outliers than this. I can see why it would be an issue that needed to be addressed, after more basic things like the left arm flailing across the chest. Maybe if the NOP environment hadn't been so toxic she could have responded better. And as she was only 17, her18.2 was still in the "healthy" range according to the boffins.

By the age of 18, the average BMI for a boy is 26.1, and for a girl, it's 24.6. The healthy range is 18.2 to 26.3 for boys and 17.6 to 26.1 for girls.

Alberto Salazar wrote:

“Because runner weight is inherently tied to performance for elite runners, I saw it as part of my job as an endurance sport coach to help the team’s runners understand the impact weight has on performance,” Salazar wrote to SI. “I had a lot of frank discussions about weight with all of my athletes—both women and men."

Salazar's frank discussions are in great contrast to Charles Cain's claim that you can't talk to kids about this.

If you can't talk to them about it, then who will??

I think it’s fair to say BMI isn’t the best measurement of health or fitness. People on this board have been saying Bekele and Chris Solinsky were fat for years and they both ran sub 27 so there’s that..