Only an independent inquiry can uncover full Nike shame
Sportswear giant has been slow to act over intolerable ordeal faced by athletes as a code of silence takes hold
Alberto Salazar will deny it, just like he denies every other shred of scandal heaped at his door these past four years, but it is abundantly clear that he has an obsession with athletes’ weight. Specifically, women’s weight. With athletics still reeling from Mary Cain’s allegation that her former track coach coerced her to become “thinner and thinner”, to the point where she missed her period for three years, further testimonies have borne out the same sinister fixation with starvation diets.
This week, Amy Yoder Begley, a 10,000metres runner who competed for the United States at the Beijing Olympics, said that she heard Salazar describe her as having the biggest backside on the starting line. There are accusations that Kara Goucher, a whistleblower on Salazar’s controversial methods at the Oregon Project, was also singled out. According to Steve Magness, Salazar, once his fellow coach, would comment on the size of Goucher’s breasts at practice sessions. What emerges is a culture of shaming and belittling, all of it carried out under the auspices of Nike, the largest sportswear giant on the planet.
Cain has gone further, recounting a pattern of physical and emotional abuse, all disputed by Salazar but substantiated by other witnesses. Dathan Ritzenhein, a marathon specialist who shared an apartment with Cain, recalled how she was so hungry she would steal his energy bars and retreat to her room, for fear of eating in front of Salazar.
One might suppose that Nike, confronted by multiplying claims that its top coach betrayed his athletes’ trust, would bring out the sackcloth and ashes in response. The details in Cain’s account are horrifying: she was, she says, instructed by Salazar to hit a weight of just 8st 2lb, so dangerously low that her menstrual cycle stopped, contributing to five broken bones. In contradiction of Salazar’s assertions, there is no record of the Oregon Project employing any nutritionist or sports psychologist with whom she could have raised her concerns.
And yet Nike, rather than offering any apology or, indeed, displaying an ounce of human decency, issued a statement that, within the first sentence, pointed the blame squarely at the athlete. “These are deeply troubling allegations, which have not been raised by Mary or her parents before,” it read. Did the company not register the fact that Cain was terrified of Salazar? So despairing did she become that she began cutting herself and having suicidal thoughts.
This human anguish was watered down by Nike’s feeble message, trivialising Cain’s story as “inconsistent with our values”. What exactly are these values, though, beyond vacuous corporatespeak? The moral code at Nike is such that the organisation stood by Lance Armstrong for months after the US Anti-doping Agency found the cyclist guilty of doping. And its supposed advocacy for women is such that sprinter Alysia Montano found her sponsorship money paused as soon as she fell pregnant.
Nike later changed its policy, but not before Montano had unmasked its fundamental hypocrisy in urging women to “dream crazier”, while penalising them financially if they dared to have a baby.
Behind the scenes, it seems as if significant change is afoot at Nike: Mark Parker, its chief executive, is stepping aside, while the Oregon Project, to the sorrow of few, is being wound down. The problem comes, however, when it is called on to acknowledge its mistakes publicly. At this point, the signals turn increasingly opaque.
In the case of Cain, Nike’s notion of accountability is to announce that it is investigating itself. Such is the severity of the allegations by Salazar’s former proteges, why should Nike, the company continuing to stand by the disgraced coach through his appeal, be trusted to examine them fully? These internal post-mortems invite the suspicion of whitewash. Only a third-party inquiry can restore the faith of athletes so dismally failed by the system.
For a corporation prioritising speed at all costs, Nike has been painfully slow on the uptake so far. It has been six weeks since Salazar was convicted by Usada of multiple violations and thrown out of the sport for four years. We can be forgiven, then, for a little scepticism when it talks of mounting an “immediate investigation”. In reality, the experiences of runners such as Cain are not being addressed with anything like the urgency they warrant.
A report this week by The Daily Telegraph highlights how bullying in track and field is far from confined to the US, with Charles van Commenee, Britain’s performance director in the lead-up to London 2012, accused of lampooning several female athletes – including heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-hill – over their weight. At this stage, one is usually legally bound to say that Van Commenee denies everything. Except the famously blunt Dutchman does nothing of the kind. “Over the last 40 years, I have called a number of athletes fat,” he says, “because they were.”
His shamelessness would suggest that fat-shaming is the logical corollary of elite sport. But is it? The agonies of Cain paint a vivid picture of what transpires when such an approach is taken to extremes. Her ordeal, and that of many others like her, illustrate how a corrosive concept of female body image has taken hold in the sport, supported by an institutional code of silence. For the sake of Cain, and her vulnerable peers, it is not a norm that can be tolerated any longer.