Alberto Salazar, the former star runner and a coach to top runners, has been banned from the sport for four years for doping violations. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) found that Salazar had been “orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct” while he was head coach of Nike’s Oregon Project.
Dr. Jeffrey S. Brown, a Nike-paid consultant and endocrinologist who treated many of Salazar’s athletes, also received a four-year suspension. The two men worked with athletes who trained in the Nike Oregon Project.
Nike funds the Oregon Project, America’s elite long-distance running training center, on its company campus in Portland, Oregon, through a $460m 26-year sponsorship deal with US Track and Field, the national governing body for the sport.
The penalty stemmed from violations that included trafficking in testosterone, tampering with the doping control process and administering improper infusions of L-carnitine, a naturally occurring substance that converts fat into energy, the anti-doping agency said in a statement.
Travis Tygart, the chief executive of Usada, in a release posted Monday said that Salazar and Brown had “demonstrated that winning was more important than the health and wellbeing of the athletes they were sworn to protect”.
Salazar was notified in 2017 that he had violated doping rules, and he contested the findings by USADA, according to an anti-doping official familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The case was heard in arbitration last year, and the ban was imposed by an independent arbitration panel..
In a statement issued late Monday, Nike said: “Today’s decision had nothing to do with administering banned substances to any Oregon Project athlete. As the panel noted, they were struck by the amount of care Alberto took to ensure he was complying with the World Anti-Doping Code. We support Alberto in his decision to appeal and wish him the full measure of due process that the rules require. Nike does not condone the use of banned substances in any manner.”
As head coach of the Nike Oregon Project, Salazar, 61, has trained stars such as Mo Farah of Britain, a four-time Olympic champion on the track; Galen Rupp, the top American marathon runner; and Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands.
“I am shocked by the outcome today,” Salazar said in a statement posted on the website for the Nike Oregon Project. He said he had always followed the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency and that he planned to appeal the ban, presumably to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Over the past decade, Salazar has helped produce some of the most successful distance athletes in the world, including current Nike Oregon Project members Hassan, Rupp, Shannon Rowbury, Jordan Hasay, Yomif Kejelcha, and Konstanze Klosterhalfen.
Former members include Matthew Centrowitz, Mo Farah, Mary Cain, Cameron Levins, Luke Puskedra, and others—many of whom left the training group after the 2015 and 2017 reports emerged.
