Day 5 of track worlds overshadowed by Salazar’s 4-year doping ban

Renowned track coach Alberto Salazar, who trained four-time Olympic champion Mo Farah, along with a gold medalist and other top contenders at this week's world championships, has been kicked out of the competition after being handed a four-year ban in a case long pursued by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

USADA said in a news release early Tuesday that an arbitration panel decided on the four-year penalty for Salazar and endocrinologist Jeffrey Brown for, among other violations, possessing and trafficking testosterone while training top runners at the Nike Oregon Project (NOP).

Brown did consulting work for the NOP and was a personal physician for some of the runners.

Among the seven runners listed as members of Salazar's team are Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, who won the 10,000-meter gold medal on Saturday night, and is entered to run later this week in the 1,500; and Donavan Brazier and Clayton Murphy of the U.S., each of whom are scheduled to run in the 800-meter final Tuesday.

The USADA ban went into effect Monday, and track's governing body, the IAAF, moved quickly to revoke Salazar's credential for the final six days in Doha. The Athletics Integrity Unit, which oversees anti-doping in track, was preparing to notify the Salazar athletes that they could not associate with their coach because of his ban.

In a statement released by NOP , Salazar said he was shocked by the arbitration outcome, and that he would appeal. He said throughout a six-year investigation, he and his athletes "endured unjust, unethical and highly damaging treatment from the USADA."

"The Oregon Project has never and will never permit doping," Salazar said. Nike supported him, putting out a statement saying that the arbitrators' reports illustrate "the amount of care Alberto took to ensure he was complying with the World Anti-Doping Code."

Hassan said she was aware of the USADA investigation when she joined Salazar's team "and have always had a clean conscience, knowing we are being monitored to the absolute fullest by USADA and" the World Anti-Doping Agency.

"I am saddened by the timing of USADA as it brings my championship out of balance," she said.

The existence of the long-running USADA investigation became public after a 2015 report by BBC and ProPublica that detailed some of Salazar's practices, which included use of testosterone gel and infusions of a supplement called L-carnitine that, when mixed with insulin, can greatly enhance athletic performance.

Distance runner Kara Goucher and a former NOP coach, Steve Magness, were among the witnesses who provided evidence for the case. USADA said it received information from 30 witnesses. Goucher left NOP in 2011, and in the ProPublica piece, she called Salazar a "sort of a win-at-all-costs person and it's hurting the sport."

Farah, who runs for Britain, worked with the Nike Oregon Project while he was racking up six world and four Olympic championships. During that period, UK Athletics did its own investigation into Salazar and gave Farah the OK to continue working with him. Farah parted ways with Salazar in 2017, saying he wanted to move back home.

On Tuesday, Farah released a statement saying he has "no tolerance for anyone who breaks the rules or crosses a line."

Salazar also coached 2012 Olympic silver medalist Galen Rupp of the U.S., who in the past has strongly denied any wrongdoing. The 61-year-old Cuban born coach was a college star at Oregon, who went on to win four major marathon titles, in New York and Boston, from 1980-82.

USADA's dogged pursuit of him in a difficult case that never directly implicated any of his athletes was a reminder of how track's doping issues stretch well beyond the Russian scandal that has overtaken the sport over the last several years. The other four Salazar athletes in Doha this week are from Ethiopia (Yomif Kejelcha), Germany (Konstanze Klosterhalfen) and the United States (Jessica Hull and Craig Engels).

USADA said it relied on more than 2,000 exhibits between the two cases and that proceedings included nearly 5,800 pages of transcripts.

"The athletes in these cases found the courage to speak out and ultimately exposed the truth," USADA CEO 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 wellbeing of the athletes they were sworn to protect."

Qatar worlds highlight track's many nationality switches

Just as migrant workers built Qatar's stadiums, a foreign-born medalist is building its reputation in track. Abderrahman Samba's bronze in the 400-meter hurdles Monday was the first Qatari medal at the world track championships and sparked joy in the VIP enclosure, the one part of the stadium where local fans were dominant.

"Today when they say my name, everybody starts screaming," Samba said. "I say to myself, 'Just go, man.'"

Samba was born in Saudi Arabia and competed for his father's home nation of Mauritania in Africa before getting a Qatari passport in 2015, just five months after moving to the country. Such nationality switches are a sore point for track's international governing body.

For years the IAAF has been trying to shut down what its council member Hamad Kalkaba Malboum likened in 2017 to a "wholesale market for African talent."

"You can't have athletes being traded, it's bordering on trafficking if you're not careful," IAAF president Sebastian Coe told The Associated Press in August. "I've had member federation presidents who have said to me openly that they were waking up to emails from people saying 'We've got so and so (who) is available for ...' You can't have that."

Qatar's team has athletes originally from at least six other countries including Britain, Nigeria and Egypt. Qatar offers athletes advanced training facilities and a chance to shine. The new arrivals generally don't have prior ties to the nation. In a country where native Qataris are vastly outnumbered by migrant workers, whether Bangladeshis on construction sites or service workers from the Philippines, relying on imported talent is nothing new.

Qatar's two-time Olympic high jump medalist Mutaz Barshim was born in the country, but sometimes Qatar and other nations seem to behave like professional soccer clubs rather than national teams.

The IAAF has reported Ashraf Amjad Al-Saifi was "spotted" when winning the Egyptian youth title in hammer throw aged 15 and handed a Qatari passport a few months later in 2011. New IAAF rules aim to prevent a repeat with a three-year waiting period to compete for a new nation.

In the Kenyan town of Iten, known as the "University of Champions" for training star distance runners, Qatar promised to build a stadium after naturalizing Kenyan runner Stephen Cherono, later known as Saif Saaeed Shaheen. The track was to bear the tartan pattern found on local people's cloaks.

Although Shaheen brought Qatar onto the international track stage with world championship gold medals in 2003 and 2005, no stadium was ever built.