Mary Cain

In 2013 at seventeen Mary Cain became the youngest American track and field athlete to make a World Championships team. A record-breaking phenom and the fastest girl in a generation, she was signed by the best track team on the planet, Nike’s elite Oregon Project headed by the acclaimed Alberto Salazar.

Salazar nearly killed her. And then spun it into a web of lies.

“For many years, the only thing I wanted in the world was the approval of Alberto Salazar.

I still loved him. Alberto was like a father to me, or even like a god…”

Over time Cain’s body, spirit and running career were ripping at the seams; she was literally falling apart to the point of being broken and crushed. Cain’s contention was that she was surrounded by an all-male coaching consortium whose training methods were ill-suited to the anatomical, psychological and subliminal needs of a teenage girl. Her coaches were convinced she had to get “thinner, and thinner, and thinner.” Then there was Salazar who apparently was a world-class shaming grandmaster, obsessed with body weight as a key barometer if not an indisputable, iron-clad guarantee of fitness and ultimately success on the track.

The way to get faster was to get thinner.

Get friendly with the weigh-in ladies; the public weigh-in.

“I think that one of the biggest things for me during that experience was that some of

the athletes he [Salazar] was weighing me in front of were my direct competitors.

Not only were they teammates, but they were women that I was actually competing

against in order to qualify for World Championship teams and Olympic teams. And

just having, like, a direct competitor look at me as failing, I think, was, from an athlete

perspective, so mortifying.

But then from a personal issue, I was an 18-year-old girl. We live in a society in which

female weight is both fetishized and also under so much scrutiny. And so trying to shame

somebody into losing weight is just such, I mean, an emotionally, psychologically and

mentally traumatizing way to coach somebody.”

When women and girls are pigeon-holed into meeting athletic standards founded upon the physical development of men and boys, it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t fly. Their bodies are different; they are susceptible to injury and at increased risk of breaking down. That’s what happened to Cain. She was forced to choose between training with the best team in the world — all the while dieting — and the prospect of developing osteoporosis and even infertility, or giving it all up. She lost her period for three years and broke five bones. Disordered eating coupled with the mental and physical abuse she was suffering spiraled a once-in-a-generation Olympic hopeful down into the swirling black vortex of sadness, frustration, depression, self-harm and thoughts of suicide.

To Kara Goucher, an Olympic distance runner who trained with the same elite program under Salazar until 2011, the scenario was all too familiar.

“When you’re training in a program like this, you’re constantly reminded how lucky you are to be there, how anyone would want to be there, and it’s this weird feeling of, ‘Well then, I can’t leave it. Who am I without it?’” she recalled painfully. “When someone proposes something you don’t want to do, whether it’s weight loss or drugs, you wonder, ‘Is this what it takes? Maybe it is, and I don’t want to have regrets.’ Your careers are so short. You are desperate. You want to capitalize on your career, but you’re not sure at what cost.”

The verbally abusive nature of the Salazar regime took many forms. Laser focus on weight loss and body shaming worked like an amoeba, relentlessly spreading and migrating to other places. Amy Yoder Begley, an Olympic middle-distance runner, was not only criticized for being overweight but she was told that her laugh was annoying and was coerced into signing a contract promising not to become friends with her teammates, against whom she was unfairly pitted. Her four tumultuous years with Salazar and the Oregon Project came to a screeching halt in September 2011. “Alberto told me he was kicking me off the team for having ‘the biggest butt on the start line,’” she said.

“His opinion could change in a matter of days,” remembered Yoder Begley, now a coach with the Atlanta Track Club. “If I had a bad workout on a Tuesday, he would tell me I looked flabby and send me to get weighed. Then, three days later, I would have a great workout and he would say how lean I looked and tell me my husband was a lucky guy. I mean, really? My body changed in three days?”

When Salazar gave her the axe, she weighed 112 pounds and her body composition was comparable to what it had been when she finished sixth in the world in the 10,000-meter run (31:13:78) at the 2009 World Championships.

Nike has come under fire recently for doping charges involving Salazar, now banned from the sport for four years. (He has filed an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport; a decision is expected in the spring of 2020). The elite Nike team has been dismantled. In October, Nike’s chief executive Mark Parker resigned his position. Emails show that Parker (along with other top Nike officials) had direct knowledge of tests being conducted by Salazar with performance- enhancing drugs from 2009 to 2011. The United States Anti-Doping Agency maintains that medical experiments were being conducted with testosterone, a banned substance, in an effort to determine how much of it could be used by athletes without detection. It is alleged that tests were also done with L-carnitine (ALCAR) to see whether an allowable amount of that substance — a mitochondrial-boosting amino acid supplement which burns fat, increases energy and endurance and aids recovery — could be used to benefit athletes.

Salazar has denied any wrongdoing, as he has repudiated many of the claims made by Mary Cain and her cohorts. In a statement issued to Sports Illustrated and the Oregonian, the veteran coach was adamant that while he may have occasionally said things that were “callous” or “insensitive,” his intention was always to “promote athletic performance in a manner that supported the good health and well-being of all his athletes…if anyone was hurt, then I’m sorry.”

Not exactly the picture of contrition.

“Last spring, I told Alberto I wanted to work with him again — only him — because when we let

people emotionally break us, we crave their approval more than anything.

I was the victim of an abusive system, an abusive man. I was constantly tormented by the

conflict of wanting to be free from him and wanting to go back to the way things used to be,

when I was his favorite.

Last month, after the doping report dropped that led to his suspension, I felt this quick and

sudden release. That helped me understand that this system is not OK. That’s why I decided

to speak up now.

I joined Nike because I wanted to be the best female athlete ever.

Instead I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by Alberto and

endorsed by Nike.”

Four-time Olympian and 2017 New York City Marathon champion Shalene Flanagan among many others commiserate with Cain and have rallied around her. In a tweet to Cain, Flanagan — a longtime Nike runner but never part of the Oregon Project — explained that [she] “had no idea it was this bad. I’m so sorry…that I never reached out to you when I saw you struggling. I made excuses to myself as to why I should mind my own business. We let you down. I will never turn my head again.”

What separates elite athletes from the rest of us is their sheer talent. Drive, desire, motivation and even desperation to be the best manifests itself differently within each individual.

The trick is identifying and achieving the balance needed between reaching the mountaintop with one’s persona and soul intact or reducing oneself to an unwitting cult-like disciple, ripe for manipulation and unhappiness.