Nike has said that it would look into runner Mary Cain’s allegations of abuse while she was part of Alberto Salazar’s training group. The runner says it reached the point where she started having suicidal thoughts and cutting herself.
Cain joined the now-disbanded Nike Oregon Project run by Salazar in 2013, soon after competing in the 1,500m final at track and field’s world championships when she was 17.
Now 23, Cain told the New York Times in a video essay that she joined Nike because she “wanted to be the best female athlete ever.”
Photo: AP
“Instead, I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by Alberto and endorsed by Nike,” she said.
Nike said in a statement these are “deeply troubling allegations that have not been raised by Mary or her parents before. Mary was seeking to rejoin the Oregon Project and Alberto’s team as recently as April of this year and had not raised these concerns as part of that process.”
The sportswear giant added that it would “take the allegations extremely seriously and will launch an immediate investigation to hear from former Oregon Project athletes.”
Cain said that under Salazar’s direction, she was told to lose weight and that he created an “arbitrary number of 114 pounds [51.7kg].”
“He would usually weigh me in front of my teammates and publicly shame me if I wasn’t hitting weight,” she said.
In 2015, Cain said that after a race, she told Salazar and the team’s sports psychologist that she was cutting herself and they “pretty much told me they wanted to go to bed. I think for me that was my kick in the head, where I was like: ‘This is a sick system.’”
Salazar was banned from the sport for four years by the US Anti-Doping Agency for experiments with supplements and testosterone that were bankrolled and supported by Nike. Nike shut down Salazar’s elite program.
In trying to cut weight, Cain said she did not have her period for three years and broke five different bones.
Cain also said that Salazar wanted to give her “birth control pills and diuretics to lose weight, the latter of which isn’t allowed in track and field.”
“I ran terrible during this time,” she added in the video. “It reached a point where I was on the starting line, and I’d lost the race before I started because in my head all I was thinking of was not the time I was trying to hit but the number on the scale I saw earlier that day.”
“I genuinely do have hope for the sport and I plan to be running for many years to come. Part of the reasons why I’m doing this now is I want to end this chapter and I want to start a new one,” Cain said at the end of her seven-minute video.
LOW-GOAL SHOOT-OUT: Of the nine penalties in the shoot-out, only three went in, with Flamengo’s Samuel Lino, and Vitinha and Nuno Mendes of PSG netting Matvei Safonov on Wednesday made four straight penalty saves in a penalty shoot-out to help Paris Saint-Germain beat Flamengo in the Intercontinental Cup final and win a sixth trophy of the year. The Russian goalkeeper was thrown in the air by his teammates after his exploits in the shoot-out, which was won 2-1 by PSG after a 1-1 draw after extra-time. It completed a trophy-laden 12 months for the French team, who had already won the Trophee des Champions, Ligue 1, the Coupe de France, the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Super Cup — also on penalties against Tottenham Hotspur in
TOOTHLESS: Bologna never looked like finding a way back, and Antonio Conte and his substitutes were waiting to celebrate long before the final whistle SSC Napoli on Monday lifted the Italian Supercoppa with a 2-0 win over Bologna in Riyadh, David Neres netting both goals to earn the league champions a deserved victory over the toothless Coppa Italia winners. Neres opened the scoring with a stunning strike from distance six minutes before halftime and found the net again in the 57th minute when Bologna were caught trying to play out of defense. “We came here as champions of Italy, we wanted this trophy and we showed it with a great performance,” Napoli forward Matteo Politano told Mediaset. “We could have scored a few more goals, but
LACKLUSTER FIGHT: At one stage, the referee lost patience with the two fighters, warning them in the fourth round that ‘the fans did not pay to see this crap’ Former world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua on Friday knocked out YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul in their controversial Netflix-backed bout in Miami. The fight at the Kaseya Center, which saw both men reportedly splitting a mammoth purse of US$184 million, had triggered alarm across boxing due to the gulf in physical size and class between Britain’s two-time former world champion Joshua and Paul, an Internet personality who has forged a lucrative career through a handful of novelty boxing contests. However, in the event, Joshua made hard work of defeating his vastly less accomplished opponent, before his superior size and power eventually told
Fulham on Monday climbed away from the English Premier League relegation zone and left Nottingham Forest mired in the fight for survival after Raul Jimenez’s penalty sealed a 1-0 win. Marco Silva’s side started the day just two points above fourth-bottom Forest, but Jimenez’s first-half goal at Craven Cottage moved them 10 points clear of the bottom three. While Fulham’s relegation fears were eased heading into the Christmas schedule, Forest are just five points ahead of third-bottom West Ham United in the scrap to avoid crashing into the Championship. Forest had won six of their previous eight games in all competitions, with a
RSS