Salazar gets 4-year ban for orchestrating doping
After speculation for years within international track and field circles that noted coach Alberto Salazar was breaking or bending the rules with regard to performance-enhancing drugs, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has imposed a four-year ban on him for “orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct.”
Also banned was Dr. Jeffrey Brown, a Houston endocrinologist with whom Salazar has worked. Salazar issued a statement denying the allegations and vowed to appeal, saying he was “shocked by the outcome” of the six-year investigation that began when Boulder runners Kara and Adam Goucher reported him to USADA. The Gouchers declined comment Tuesday.
“We aren’t talking to anybody right now,” Adam Goucher wrote in a text to The Denver Post.
Travis Tygart, chief executive of USADA which is based in Colorado Springs, saluted them in the announcement the agency released Monday night.
“The athletes in these cases found the courage to speak out and ultimately exposed the truth,” 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.”
The Gouchers reported Salazar and the Oregon Project to USADA in 2013. Two years later, they spoke out against him in a devastating BBC documentary that made international headlines.
Boulder’s Frank Shorter, the chairman of USADA when it was formed in 2000 to investigate doping in Olympic sports, speculated the Gouchers are holding their silence until Salazar’s final appeal is heard by the international Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. That panel’s decision would be final.
“The fact that they’re still not going to talk about it until probably it’s through the final appeal shows why they were doing it and reinforces how they wanted to go about it — it wasn’t about them,” Shorter said in an interview with The Denver Post. “They had to weigh the resources that had been mustered against them and decided to do it because it was the right thing to do.”
The sanctions against Salazar and Brown were handed down after two arbitration panels agreed with USADA that Salazar and Brown “trafficked” in testosterone, administered a prohibited intravenous infusion and “engaged in tampering to attempt to prevent relevant information about their conduct from being learned by USADA.”
Athletes coached by Salazar as part of the Nike Oregon Project have had remarkable success in recent years.
Mo Farah and Galen Rupp took gold and silver, respectively, in the 10,000 meters at the 2012 London Olympics. Four years later in Rio, Matt Centrowitz became the first American since 1908 to win the 1,500 meters at the Olympics.
“Throughout this sixyear investigation my athletes and I have endured unjust, unethical and highly damaging treatment from USADA,” Salazar said. “The Oregon Project has never and will never permit doping. I will appeal and look forward to this unfair and protracted process reaching the conclusion I know to be true. I will not be commenting further at this time.”
USADA said it found evidence of “extensive and troubling medical coordination” between Salazar and Brown.
“USADA’s investigation yielded a wide range of evidence referenced in the hearing, including eye-witness proof, testimonies, contemporaneous emails, and patient records,” USADA’s announcement said. “Between the two cases, USADA relied on more than 2,000 exhibits, which the (arbitration panels) heard along with the defendants’ cases. In all, the proceedings included 30 witnesses and 5,780 pages of transcripts.”