When A Famed Nike Coach Tried To Steal A Race, A Track Protest Was Born

[n2doc]

Sarah Barker


The scene was unprecedented: seven runners walking off the track hand in hand, in quiet protest against their own governing body. The women had just run the 1,500-meter race at the U.S. indoor national championships on Feb. 23 in Albuquerque.

The day before, the winner of the 3,000-meter race, Gabe Grunewald, had been disqualified by one of the most powerful men in track, Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar, for supposedly interfering with one of his athletes. How Salazar managed the feat is still unclear, but to fans and to other runners it was obvious what had happened: The people who really run the sport had prevailed upon the people who nominally do to change a result in their favor.

By itself, this was nothing new—dictatorial, rule-bending judgments are the order of the day in track. What was new was the backlash: an immediate eruption on social media and the small, televised show of solidarity after the 1,500, which a day later led to Grunewald's reinstatement as national champion. And the outcry is ongoing. People are pissed about the way the sport is run—about the lack of transparency, about the way the athletes are left out of the process, about the appearance of Nike favoritism—and for the first time they're saying so en masse and out loud, right there in front of God and Phil Knight. Call it the Albuquerque Spring.

To understand what's happening here, you first have to understand that this sort of thing never happens in the track world, which exists largely thanks to Nike's dollars. According to USA Track & Field's 2012 annual report, sponsorships account for 45 percent of the nonprofit's operating budget, and Nike is by far the most generous donor. That money buys, among other things, the grudging acquiescence of runners who might otherwise object to their sport's unhealthy relationship with its patron. So when USATF appoints team coaches, determines who moves on from a semi-final, or adjudicates protests behind closed doors—or when yet another decision comes down in favor of a Nike athlete—the grumbling is often tempered by the knowledge that the track the athletes are standing on and the meet they're competing in might not exist without Nike's largesse. That's the way of the world, right? Put up or shut up. Add to that dynamic the fact that track athletes are not of the Richard Sherman school of public relations—they're quiet and undemonstrative—and you've got yourself, in simplistic terms, a classful of underweight, underpaid geeks getting stuffed into lockers while the principal looks the other way.

Or at least, that's how it used to be, until the Foul Foul of Gabe Grunewald.

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http://deadspin.com/when-a-famed-nike-coach-tried-to-steal-a-race-a-track-1538116204

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. ban salazar for life.

That would be a good start.