Running icon Alberto Salazar’s fall from grace stirs strong emotions across track and field – OregonLive

Alberto Salazar, one of Oregon’s best-known athletes and a distance-running icon, has always pushed the envelope.

Finally, an arbitration panel ruled this week, he crossed the line.

Many in the track and field community believe Salazar either has been cheating outright or successfully finding ways to chemically game the system for years. They expressed relief and vindication at Monday’s decision to ban him for four years.

The six-year investigation by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency resulted in three rules violations, none directly linking a banned performance-enhancing supplement to any of his athletes.

Salazar, a former University of Oregon star whose name is on one of the buildings on the Nike campus and is coach of the powerful Nike Oregon Project distance team, has promised to appeal his sanctions to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

His suspension is the latest doping scandal to plague track and field.

“The fans, coaches and athletes do want change and we’re tired of this,” said Martin Bingisser, a coach and former elite hammer thrower. “So when a coach comes along arrogantly and openly pushing the limits, ignoring the spirit of the rules, and producing jaw-dropping performances, it feels like all the progress we’ve made against doping is for nothing.”

In a statement announcing the bans for Salazar and Dr. Jeffrey Brown, a former Oregon Project consultant, USADA chief executive Travis Tygart said: “While acting in connection with the Nike Oregon Project, Mr. Salazar and Dr. Brown demonstrated that winning was more important than the health and well-being of the athletes they were sworn to protect.”

Salazar, 61, declined to comment to The Oregonian/OregonLive for this story.

Two of the three violations the panel found were for drug tests Salazar directed from a distance or personally oversaw involving people who never have competed for the Oregon Project, or at an elite level.

The third appears to be a rules misunderstanding. Emails between Salazar and USADA show Salazar trying to more precisely understand what is allowable and what needs to be disclosed to drug testers.

In its conclusion, the arbitration panel wrote Salazar “made unintentional mistakes that violated the rules, apparently motivated by his desire to provide the very best results and training for athletes under his care. Unfortunately, that desire clouded his judgment in some instances, when his usual focus on the rules appears to have lapsed.”

The man who coached Mo Farah to four Olympic gold medals, Matthew Centrowitz to one, Galen Rupp to an Olympic silver medal in 2012 and a bronze in 2016, who guided Sifan Hassan to gold in the women’s 10,000 meters in this year’s world championships, has been declared a cheater.

Olympic medalist Jenny Simpson spoke for those feeling vindicated from Doha, Qatar, in an interview at the World Outdoor Track & Field Championships.

Asked by reporters about Salazar’s four-year suspension, she responded: “Get him out. … I’m a believer in lifetime bans. I wish it was longer. Don’t cheat.

“Anybody who knows anything about this sport knows there is a black shadow, a black cloud, whatever the analogy you want to make, over that group. So, why anyone chooses to be part of that group, I have no idea.”

Others feel any portrait of Salazar as a schemer, armed with a test tube and a pile of Nike money, is one-dimensional, unfair and doesn’t reflect Salazar’s technical coaching expertise, his dedication to his athletes or his attempts to stay within the rules.

Former University of Oregon runner Luke Puskedra said he is saddened by the vitriol coming Salazar’s way.

Puskedra trained with the Oregon Project from 2012-14. He said Salazar never pushed him to take any substance other than vitamins and iron tablets, and erred on the side of caution.

When they split amicably in 2014, Puskedra said Salazar told him: “I’m just sorry I couldn’t get you to run faster.”

Salazar re-emerged in Puskedra’s life in the winter of 2016. Puskedra’s seven-month-old daughter, Penelope, was diagnosed with cancer of the adrenal glands and treated at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.

Salazar stepped in to provide both emotional and financial support. Penelope recovered and is now healthy.

“The headlines make Alberto sound like a monster,” Puskedra said. “This is the same person making sure my daughter is taken care of, that we can make it in Doernbecher. He is a very kind person.”

In a statement, Rupp also defended Salazar. He wrote that, in his experience, Salazar took great pains to stay compliant with doping rules. Salazar “always put my health and well-being first, and has done the same with other athletes,” Rupp wrote.

Salazar personally has coached Rupp, now 33, since he was in high school after discovering him on a Central Catholic soccer field.

Salazar’s very zeal to do the best he can to make his athletes the best they can be are at the root of what critics find disturbing.

As an athlete, he pushed his body to its limits and beyond. He was an NCAA cross country champion at Oregon, won three New York City marathon titles and drove himself so hard in the 1978 Falmouth Road Race, he collapsed at the finish line with a body temperature of 107. A priest was summoned to give him last rites.

While winning the 1982 Boston Marathon, Salazar refused water on the course, and then rushed to the emergency room for six liters of saline.

Critics believe that burning intensity carries over into his coaching — not that he drives his athletes to damage their bodies by overtraining them, but that he pushes against the boundaries of what is allowable.

One of the violations concerns the decision for Steve Magness, then an Oregon Project assistant coach, to test the amino acid L-carnitine in 2011 as a possible legal performance enhancer.

Everybody — Salazar, Magness and USADA — agrees that for purposes of the test, Magness was given more L-carnitine than would be permissible to an athlete.

USADA charged Magness, who had been a college distance runner and still ran competitively in recreational road races, was an athlete, and subject to doping rules.

Salazar argued Magness performed the test in his role as a coach, and there was no intent for him to run competitively for the Oregon Project.

The panel determined Magness technically still was an athlete, and thus the test broke a doping rule. The panel noted that Magness, now distance coach at the University of Houston, also is subject to sanction, although USADA has not charged him.

USADA charged and Salazar admitted to giving his two adult sons small amounts of a testosterone gel in 2009 to determine whether the doses would trigger a positive drug test. Testosterone, a male hormone, is not a legal supplement.

Salazar said the test was designed to see whether Oregon Project athletes could be unknowingly sabotaged by a third party through casual contact. He has said he deliberately did not perform the test on an elite athlete.

USADA charged that conducting the test at all was a rules violation, and the panel agreed. Critics see darker intent, believing Salazar was trying to determine how much of an illegal micro-dose his athletes could take and avoid detection.

Even a benign interpretation of Salazar’s intent, critics suggest, indicates someone obsessed with getting as close as possible to a rules violation without actually committing one.

For instance, records show Salazar exchanged repeated emails with USADA about the rules around L-carnitine and whether his athletes needed to disclose to a drug tester they had received a dose. The panel characterized this as him trying to determine precisely where the line was.

There is no doubt Salazar is a talented and meticulous coach, given the success of Farah, Centrowitz, Rupp, Hassan and Jordan Hasay, the Oregon Project runner who twice finished third in the Boston Marathon.

Salazar broke down Rupp’s stride and reconstructed it. He puts his runners through hard workouts immediately after a race, a practice once panned but now copied.

He monitors his athletes’ diets and sleep. He pioneered the use of altitude chambers. He famously drove himself so hard as a coach he suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 2007. Salazar was clinically dead for 14 minutes.

He has shared his technical expertise with other coaches without apparent reservation.

But some critics see Salazar as representative of a Nike culture that prioritizes winning at all costs. They believe the sports equipment and apparel giant has been willing to accept his mode of operation and give him whatever funding he needed as long as he produced.

Nike’s sway in elite track and road running is hard to overstate. The company underwrites the budget for USA Track & Field, and will do so through 2040, as the result of a 23-year, $400 million deal that took effect in 2017.

Nike funds three of the world’s top distance training groups — the Oregon Project, Bowerman Track Club and Oregon Track Club Elite. It provides the financial muscle for the Prefontaine Classic, by some metrics the best non-championship meet in the world.

Track athletes who don’t have Nike sponsorship, or who lose it, often find themselves outgunned financially, without access to the kind of coaching, medical support and training facilities Nike athletes enjoy.

The belief Salazar would further tip the balance through illicit means has led to the perception it’s a rigged game.

It doesn’t bother critics with that perception that the rules violations leading to Salazar’s ban would appear to be technicalities. For them, it’s like Al Capone being sent away for tax evasion.

Undeterred by the USADA investigation or the arbitration panel’s report, Nike is promising to stand behind Salazar through his appeal.

Puskedra, who has left the sport and lives in Eugene, is standing behind him, too.

“Running is such a small thing,” he said. “If you are ethical in your life outside of running, it is hard for me to believe you would not be ethical in running.”

Asked to comment about Salazar, Hasay demurred. She referred instead to a statement she posted on her Instagram account.

The statement reads, in part: “Alberto has been like a father figure to me and has treated me with nothing but respect and the highest of ethical coaching standards.”

— Ken Goe

kgoe@oregonian.com | @KenGoe