WASHINGTON, United States: The Nike Oregon Project was set up to end the distance-running dominance of the east Africans but has become a huge headache for the US sportswear giant, which said Friday it was shutting it down.
Alberto Salazar, the coach who founded the prestigious Portland-based training group in 2001, pushed himself to the brink as an athlete, and preached the same philosophy as a coach.
But the 61-year-old Cuban-born American’s will to win went too far, according to the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which last week banned him for four years for multiple doping violations.
Salazar has been a major figure in American athletics for decades, having won the 1980, 1981 and 1982 New York Marathons and the 1982 Boston Marathon.
He is a long-time friend of Nike founder Phil Knight and persuaded him that if the company financed his dream project, he could end the stranglehold of Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes on distances from 800 meters to 10,000m and the marathon.
Salazar’s career is intertwined with Nike’s rise to become the world’s pre-eminent sportswear manufacturer — he even has a tattoo of the company’s swoosh logo.
Even as Nike CEO Mark Parker announced he was closing the Oregon Project on Friday, he said in a memo to staff that Nike would still support Salazar in his appeal because the ban “for someone who acted in good faith is wrong.”
Parker said the arbitration panel that finalized Salazar’s ban “found there was no orchestrated doping, no finding that performance enhancing drugs have ever been used on Oregon Project athletes and went out of its way to note Alberto’s desire to follow all rules.”
The group’s most successful athlete is Britain’s Mo Farah, the 2012 and 2016 Olympic champion at 5,000 meters and 10,000m. Farah left the Oregon Project in 2017.
The project currently includes Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, who won the women’s 1500m and 10,000m titles at the World Championships in Doha last week, and Donavan Brazier, who took the men’s 800m gold.
There is no suggestion that any of these athletes have been involved in wrongdoing, but since Salazar’s ban, Farah is facing new questions about why he continued working with the coach even when he knew he was under investigation.
Farah won the Oregon Project’s first Olympic gold in 2012 in London in the 10,000m. Galen Rupp, a long-time Salazar protege, took the silver medal behind him, and Farah also claimed the 5,000m gold.
But behind the scenes, Salazar’s colleagues were concerned. Steve Magness, who spent 18 months as Salazar’s assistant but quit before the London Olympics, spoke out as a whistleblower when the BBC’s investigative show Panorama and ProPublica investigated doping allegations in 2015.
Testimony from various figures alleged microdosing of testosterone, among other suspicious actions.
The USADA report into Salazar’s activities revealed that Salazar kept Nike CEO Parker informed of his experiments with injecting a mixture of amino acid and dextrose at doses clearly above what would be allowed under World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) regulations.
In another email to Parker, Jeffrey Brown, a doctor who worked with the NOP and has also now been banned, described experiments with testosterone gel.
Parker responded to Brown, “It will be interesting to determine the minimal amount of topical male hormone required to create a positive test.”
A Nike spokesman said Parker “had no reason to believe that the test was outside any rules as a medical doctor was involved” and that he believed Salazar “was attempting to prevent doping of his athletes.”
Under Salazar’s guidance, Farah won another golden double at the Rio Olympics in 2016 where Rupp took marathon bronze and another Oregon Project athlete, Matt Centrowitz, won the 1,500m.
By the time Farah left the group in October 2017, USADA was investigating Salazar and Brown.
The case against the two went to the American Arbitration Association, with hearings conducted in May and June 2018 setting the stage for the rulings handed down last week.
USADA chief executive Travis Tygart said Salazar and Brown had “demonstrated that winning was more important than the health and wellbeing of the athletes they were sworn to protect.”
Salazar has strongly denied any wrongdoing and said he and his athletes “have endured unjust, unethical and highly damaging treatment from USADA.”
“The Oregon Project has never and will never permit doping,” he said.
Nike’s groundbreaking Oregon Project wound up in disgrace
Nike’s groundbreaking Oregon Project wound up in disgrace
- Alberto Salazar is a long-time friend of Nike founder Phil Knight and persuaded him that if the company financed his dream project, he could end the stranglehold of Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes
- But the 61-year-old Cuban-born American’s will to win went too far, according to the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which last week banned him for four years for multiple doping violations
Injuries a blessing in disguise for Australia as new Ashes heroes emerge
- The absence of key bowlers did not hamper the home team’s determination to win the series
LONDON: Before the recently concluded Ashes series between Australia and England began, I mused on the potential impact which injuries to two of Australia’s fast bowlers may have on the outcome.
There was a sense, at least amongst England’s supporters, that they had a chance of winning the series or, at least, running Australia very close. As those supporters are now well aware, any such hopes were dashed in disappointing fashion.
England’s performances have been raked over ad infinitum in the media and on social media. It seems almost unnecessary to add to this welter of views and analyses.
However, it is worth going back to my pre-series thoughts about the potential impact of injuries and whether they did have an impact on the outcome.
One of the triumvirate of Australian quicks, Josh Hazlewood, was ruled out of the series before it began. Doubts over a second member, Pat Cummins, the team captain, were confirmed before the first Test. Ongoing back problems restricted him to one Test, the third.
This placed significant responsibility on the third member, Mitchell Starc, as well as the replacements for Hazlewood and Cummins and the stand-in captain, Steve Smith. Starc rose to the occasion magnificently.
At lunch on the second day, England sat in the box seat, 100 runs ahead and nine second innings wickets standing. By the end of the day, Australia had won the match. This was thanks to a seven-wicket haul by Starc and a swashbuckling 123 by Travis Head that left England “shellshocked,” according to its captain, Ben Stokes.
Head had been promoted to open because of injury to regular opener, Usman Khawaja. In the second Test at Brisbane, Starc reduced England to five for two in its first innings, going on to claim six wickets. It was a replacement quick bowler, Michael Nesser, who took the honors in the second innings with five wickets in Australia’s victory.
At Adelaide in the third Test, Starc was relatively quiet, claiming four wickets, as Cummins returned to claim six, along with spinner Nathan Lyon, who added five to take his total Test wickets to 567. He would not add more because of a hamstring injury. Cummins also sat out the rest of the series.
Although England won the fourth Test at Melbourne, in another two-day contest, Australia claimed the fifth Test at Sydney, where Starc took five wickets to take his series total to 31 and become player of the series. It may be safely concluded that injuries to key Australian bowlers did not hamper Australia’s determination to win the series.
One English broadcaster of considerable experience opined that England had played Australia’s second XI for most of the time. Although, in addition to key bowlers, Australia was without opening batter, Khawaja, for 1.5 Tests, this seems to be pushing the impact of injuries too far.
It also begs the question of why England could not take advantage. Three quick bowlers left the series due to injury, dealing a blow to a strategy based on fast bowlers.
Both Mark Wood and Jofra Archer have had their careers blighted by injury in recent years and it was little surprise that Wood’s tour ended after the first Test and Archer’s after the third.
Gus Atkinson followed them in Melbourne, whilst the super-human efforts to which Ben Stokes insisted on subjecting his body, finally got the better of him in the final Test. None of the batters got physically injured sufficiently to cause them to miss a Test.
The postmortems on where it all went wrong for England have intensified since the fifth Test was concluded. There are myriad views ranging from ex-players, to broadcasters, print and press media and anyone who loves the game.
The England and Wales Cricket Board will conduct an internal review. It will not be the first one and probably not the last. At the heart of any review should be a central question: If the two teams were judged to be close in ability prior to the series, as they were by most pundits, how did that judgement translate into a 4-1 advantage for Australia?
All manner of accusations have been levelled at England’s players and management.
Amongst these are inadequate preparation, poor technique, inferior mental toughness, arrogance, an unwavering belief in the aggressive, fearless, strategy adopted over the last three years, a laissez-faire culture that has led to a lack of discipline, and a drinking culture. This is a long charge sheet.
There is an old saying that cricket is played in the head. The strategy adopted by England over the last three years has put into the players’ heads the need to be positive and aggressive. Some have been confused by this mantra and have moved away from playing their natural game.
Joe Root has been an example. His class and technique do not need him to be any more aggressive than his talent naturally facilitates. The best opponents — India and Australia — have prepared themselves for England’s approach.
In this last series Australia effectively nullified it, except for several sessions. One of these was at Adelaide, where England made a bold attempt to chase down a target of 424 runs. The consensus view is that Australia outplayed England in the basics of the game.
Glenn McGrath, who took 563 Test wickets for Australia between 1993 and 2007, said that he “bored” people out. He aimed to hit the top of off stump with every delivery, saying that “it is pretty simple stuff, but the complicated thing is to keep it simple.”
This requires a combination of mental discipline and technical skill. Australia’s bowlers followed this approach more successfully than England’s. Australia’s batters scored faster than England when they needed to do so. When conditions changed, they adapted, as in the first innings in Brisbane where they ground out a total of 511 to gain a lead of 177 runs.
In the aftermath of the series defeat, Stokes reflected that “we’re at an interesting place as a team. What we managed to achieve in the first two-and-a-half years was very good.
“We wanted to grow as a team and we wanted to be even more consistent. If anything, we’ve done the opposite. We've started losing more. When that is happening on a consistent basis … you need to look at the drawing board and make some adjustments to get you back on the path of success.”
This suggests an acceptance that there is a problem and that a revised strategy may be implemented in which a return to the basics of the game and an acceptance that the match situation needs to be better assessed might be expected.
It also suggests that Stokes is thinking along different lines to the coach, who has said that he is “open to progress, open to evolution and some nipping and tucking,” but wants “ultimately to be able to steer the ship.”
In the first innings on day two of the third Test at Adelaide, with England reeling on 71 for four, Stokes played an innings which was the antithesis of the team’s attacking strategy.
In 41 degrees Celsius, he was targeted relentlessly by Australia’s attack, taking blows to his body and head, scoring 45 from 151 by the close of play. The following day he was finally dismissed for 83 from 198 deliveries. It was as if he was saying to his fellow batters, there are times when it is acceptable to adopt a different approach, according to the circumstance of the match.
It remains to be seen if there will be a change of approach or personnel when England’s next Test series is played against New Zealand in June. The next action is the T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka, a format which demands attacking approaches.
A failed campaign will place even greater pressure on England’s management. They are low on credit, having left behind a feeling of disappointment and anti-climax in Australia, for whom injuries proved to be a blessing in disguise.
