Nike scandal: Take ’weighting game’ out of women’s athletics - Palm Beach Post

Through advertising, social media and guerilla marketing, Nike promotes itself as more than just an athletic shoe and apparel company.

It also envisions itself a lifestyle brand and champion of social causes — especially female empowerment.

Earlier this year, Mark Parker, the company’s chairman, CEO and president said, “We think 2019 is going to be a true tipping point for women in sport, with more participation, more coverage, and overall, more energy.”

Too bad it seems that nobody in power at the Nike Oregon Project — the company’s professional track and distance running team of athletes who lived and trained together — got the message.

Last month, the 18-year-old program was disbanded after head coach and founder Alberto Salazar — the legendary American marathoner and three-time winner of the New York City Marathon — received a four-year coaching ban from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency because he allegedly “trafficked testosterone, infused a prohibited amount of L-carnitine and tried to tamper with doping controls."

That Salazar — who denies the charges and is appealing the ban — would be caught up in a doping scandal is hardly surprising.

Rumors about him being on the wrong side of the rules have been swirling since the BBC and Pro Publica reported on it in 2015.

But the headlines for Salazar and Nike have only gotten worse.

Earlier this month, former Nike Oregon Project runner Mary Cain, now 23, detailed in a New York Times video op-ed how, after signing with Nike in 2013 at age 17, the former high school phenom was subjected to years of untold cruelty — highlighted by public humiliation and body-shaming over her weight.

"I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by Alberto and endorsed by Nike," said Cain, who left the Nike Oregon Project in 2016.

So constant was the verbal and psychological abuse — especially when she didn’t hit her target times — that Cain said she developed an eating disorder, started cutting herself, stopped menstruating and lost so much bone density that she suffered five separate fractures and became suicidal.

Cain’s disclosures rocked the athletic world.

They prompted Nike to launch a self-investigation — and led to other elite female former Nike athletes to share just how toxic the atmosphere was at Nike Oregon Project.

Especially when it came to female runners’ bodies and weight.

“After placing 6th in the 10,000m at the 2011 USATF championships, I was kicked out of the Oregon Project. I was told I was too fat and ‘had the biggest butt on the starting line,'” tweeted 2008 Olympian Amy Yoder Begley.

Kara Goucher, a 2012 Olympic marathoner who helped provide doping evidence against Salazar, tweeted that “the culture was unbearable.”

Goucher’s husband, fellow distance runner Adam Goucher, who also trained under Salazar, was much more specific.

He tweeted that after Kara finished in sixth place at the 2011 Boston Marathon in a personal record of two hours, 24 minutes — just six months after giving birth to the couple’s first child — Salazar and sports psychologist Darren Treasure told Kara’s mother and sister that Kara “... is still too heavy. She needs to lose her baby weight if she wants to be fast again.”

In a powerful New York Times op-ed last week, former professional runner Lauren Fleshman denounced “the very common practice for coaches to directly create an eating-disorder culture in the name of performance by focusing on weight and appearance.”

Female athletes in individual sports such as swimming, gymnastics and figure skating are also extremely vulnerable to the eating-disorder and body-dysmorphia culture that prioritizes aesthetics over sustainable fitness and health.

Fleshman believes that this approach is especially harmful to female high school and college runners because “the natural improvement curve of young women generally includes a performance dip or plateau as the body adjusts to the changes of adolescence.”

In other words, female biochemistry dictates different performance-improvement expectations than the ones used for male runners, who are expected to improve in a more predictable, linear fashion.

Fleshman became a five-time NCAA champion and 15-time All-American at Stanford by not trying to conform to the “thinner is better” model.

But during her senior year, she succumbed to the prevailing wisdom, “restrict[ing] my diet to make my 21-year-old body, still soft from the new estrogen infusing it, look like the leaner 28-year-old women I saw making Olympic teams. I wasn’t ready for that kind of body. I made myself into it anyway. I may have looked the part, but I lost my energy. I lost my period, and injuries set in, derailing the first half of my professional running career.”

Overhauling how all coaches — but especially male coaches — approach the training of female athletes won’t be easy or simple.

There are decades worth of systemic paternalism and outdated protocols to undo.

But undoing them — or, even better, creating a brand-new system — is vital if we’re to ensure that more elite female athletes have the best chance to reach their full potential.

As Fleshman wrote, “If sports were built for young women and girls, the focus on weight would be replaced with basic nutrition and education, which would dramatically reduce injuries and mental health disorders for all genders.”