Alberto Salazar Has Always Lived on the Edge – The New York Times

Years ago, while covering a track meet in Eugene, Ore., I was driving to breakfast, or to the stadium, when I saw a figure jogging along the road, bent and listing. As I passed, I realized it was Alberto Salazar, once among the greatest American marathon runners, a three-time winner in New York and the Boston champion in an epic finish in 1982.

Even in his prime, Salazar ran with what Neil Amdur of The New York Times once described as a “duck-like wobble.” In retirement, he was left with a body broken by so many hard miles. Each stride seemed full of agony and something resembling denial. Or perhaps grief and regret.

That’s the image I recalled Monday night upon hearing that Salazar, 61, the world’s best-known coach of distance runners and head of the Nike Oregon Project, had been suspended four years for violating the rules against doping. He vehemently denied the accusations. But unless he is successful on appeal, his coaching career and his reputation may end up as wrecked as his body.

Full disclosure: I believe doping should be legal. At the least, sports would be more honest. It is naïve and hypocritical for the rest of us to enhance our daily performance with a medicine-cabinet buffet while insisting that elite athletes should achieve the miraculous on bananas and water. And while looking the other way when Olympians are given exemptions for using asthma medication and other drugs that can enhance their medal chances.

But my opinion remains a minority view. To be clear, I don’t condone some behaviors examined in the Salazar case, including testing substances on athletes who seemingly did not know what was being done to them and altering medical records.

Salazar now may have to pay a steep price. As with his running, he pushed so hard with his coaching methods that he crossed a line, veering from the questionable to the pharmacologically impermissible, according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

The American Arbitration Association panel that imposed Monday’s ban acknowledged that Salazar made some “unintentional mistakes that violated the rules.” He seemed motivated by trying to provide the best training and results for his athletes, the panel wrote, but that desire “clouded his judgment in some instances.”

Hence, the accusations made against Salazar by USADA and a 2015 investigative report by the BBC and ProPublica: experimenting with testosterone gels on his son; giving athletes substances that were not medically necessary, like thyroid and asthma medication, to enhance their performance; infusing improper amounts of a substance called L-carnitine, which converts fat into energy.

The pushing of boundaries and the restless tinkering precisely describe — in a general sense, unrelated to doping — the Salazar I covered for years as a coach and whose legend as a runner I came to know.

John Brant, who co-wrote Salazar’s memoir and “Duel in the Sun,” a book about Salazar’s 1982 Boston Marathon victory, recalled on Tuesday a conversation he had with the high school coach of Galen Rupp before the 2016 Rio Olympics. Rupp, coached by Salazar, finished third in that Olympic marathon.

“Alberto is like the pit boss in an Indy 500 crew,” Dave Frank, Rupp’s coach at Central Catholic High School in Portland, Ore., told Brant for an article in Runners World magazine. “If the rules say that a tire can’t exceed a certain width, that pit boss is going to have tires that are built to that limit and not a millimeter less. The pit boss would never think he was cheating by pushing the rules to the limit, and neither would Alberto.”

Now, Salazar has been found guilty of trying to make the tires a little wider than they should have been. Pit crew mechanic, though, seemed an apt description for much of what he did.

I went to see Salazar in Albuquerque, N.M., in 2010 when he was training Dathan Ritzenheim for the New York City Marathon. He was changing Ritzenheim’s posture and stride, altering the way his foot struck the ground, admonishing him that Ethiopians and Kenyans were running 160 miles a week and if they had better biomechanics, too, “you are in trouble.”

At the 2012 London Olympics, I visited Rupp’s hotel room after he won a silver medal at 10,000 meters. Salazar was excited about a mobile lab that had pulled up to the hotel. It was a cryotherapy chamber, perfectly legal, meant to speed recovery by inhibiting inflammation and enhancing oxygenation of the muscles.

“It feels like an ice bath on steroids,” Rupp said, in what now may seem like an unfortunate choice of words.

As a runner, Salazar most famously pushed himself to a dangerous limit along the humid, seven-mile course of the 1978 Falmouth Road Race on Cape Cod, where he ended up with a body temperature of 107 degrees and was administered last rites.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an athlete drive himself as hard as Alberto,” said George Hirsch, chairman of the board of New York Road Runners, the organizers of the New York City Marathon, where Salazar won in his debut at 26.2 miles in 1980.

In Salazar’s coaching, Hirsch said, “There was always this sense that Alberto would push the envelope but that to his credit, he knew where the line was and got to the edge but within legal limits.”

Others were more suspicious. According to USADA, Salazar strayed beyond the allowable. His greatest athlete, Mo Farah of Britain, who won four Olympic gold medals on the track and left the Nike Oregon Project in 2017, said in a statement, “I have no tolerance for anyone who breaks the rules or crosses a line.”

The response among people I spoke with on Tuesday seemed more bittersweet.

Salazar is on a short list of legendary American marathon runners — Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Bill Rodgers, Meb Keflezighi, Deena Kastor. Rodgers, who won Boston and New York four times each and trained with Salazar when Salazar was just a superfast teen from suburban Boston, said, “This is a thin case.”

For those keeping score, though, the report is 140 pages thick.

Few have possessed Salazar’s determination to succeed, which brought him to soaring heights and may have contributed to his downfall.

“Alberto is one of the true heroes of the sport,” Hirsch said. “Any questions raised, that’s concerning for sure.”