Another of Alberto Salazar’s Runners Says He Ridiculed Her Body for Years – The New York Times

For Amy Yoder Begley, an Olympic middle-distance runner, four tumultuous years with Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project came to an abrupt end in September 2011.

“Alberto told me he was kicking me off the team for having ‘the biggest butt on the start line,’” Yoder Begley said.

Salazar’s critical assessments of her body, how she socialized with her teammates, even the sound of her laugh, had finally reached a breaking point. She was out of the Oregon Project, the elite training group Nike bankrolled to develop mostly American runners it hoped would become the world’s best.

Yoder Begley is the latest former Oregon Project member to publicly accuse Salazar of manipulating and verbally abusing the athletes who trained under him. The other runners include Kara Goucher, a two-time Olympian, and Mary Cain, a prodigy who skipped collegiate running to train with Salazar but quit the team within a few years, her body and her spirit broken by overtraining and verbal abuse.

While Salazar’s methods initially produced success with some runners, Yoder Begley and others claim they ultimately damaged promising careers. The complaints, which include putting young women on prescription medication to spur weight loss, holding public weigh-ins and making humiliating comments in front of teammates, have sparked a national conversation about how female athletes are treated by coaches who believe criticism, which can resemble bullying, is essential for success.

“His opinion could change in a matter of days,” said Yoder Begley, now a coach with the Atlanta Track Club, a longtime running organization that is training elite athletes. “If I had a bad workout on a Tuesday, he would tell me I looked flabby and send me to get weighed. Then, three days later, I would have a great workout and he would say how lean I looked and tell me my husband was a lucky guy. I mean, really? My body changed in three days?”

Salazar did not respond to requests for comment from The New York Times. He is currently serving a four-year ban from the sport for violating antidoping regulations. He has denied the doping charges and plans to appeal the decision.

In a statement released to Sports Illustrated and The Oregonian, however, he appeared to acknowledge that some of the accusations by Cain, Goucher and Yoder Begley were true.

“My foremost goal as a coach was to promote athletic performance in a manner that supported the good health and well-being of all my athletes,” Salazar wrote in the statement. “On occasion, I may have made comments that were callous or insensitive over the course of years of helping my athletes through hard training. If any athlete was hurt by any comments that I have made, such an effect was entirely unintended, and I am sorry.

“I do dispute, however, the notion that any athlete suffered any abuse or gender discrimination while running for the Oregon Project.”

Nike shut down the project last month after the doping ruling against Salazar. The company did not respond to a request for comment on the accusations regarding his weight-loss regimen and verbal abuse.

Yoder Begley became a running star in high school. She reached her adult height of 5 feet 4 inches in eighth grade, and as she blossomed as a runner, her body found its natural weight of about 115 pounds. Other girls were leaner, but Yoder Begley became the Indiana state champion in cross-country and at 3,200 meters, and earned a track scholarship to the University of Arkansas.

In her freshman year in college, she experienced her first battle with weight. She had a weakness for the readily available ice cream in the dining hall and put on 13 pounds.

She remembers her track coach expressing concern. When her weight got into the same range as that of her boyfriend and soon-to-be husband, Andrew Begley, a fellow Razorbacks runner, she promptly got back to 115. She went on to win two N.C.A.A. championships and became a 15-time all-American.

After college, Andrew Begley took over as her coach. She had sporadic success, winning the 10-kilometer road racing national championship in 2004. But having her spouse as her coach and supervising what food she was putting in her body “was not a good situation,” she said.

In 2007, partly because Goucher wanted a training partner, Nike and Salazar took a chance on Yoder Begley, allowing her to join the Oregon Project even though she had had limited success and was recovering from hip and ankle injuries.

Within months, Yoder Begley said, Salazar had decided she needed to be leaner. She worked with a team nutritionist to reduce her calorie intake and manage a diet limited by celiac disease. Yet whenever she had bad workouts, she said, Salazar would accuse her of not following her nutrition plan or make comments about her thighs, stomach or rear end.

“He was obsessed with her butt,” Goucher said of Salazar. “He would always talk about how it was hanging out of her shorts.”

The criticism went beyond Yoder Begley’s appearance and weight, which she said was usually 112 to 116 pounds. At one workout in March 2008, when Yoder Begley said she was mourning the recent death of her dog, Salazar told her she was bringing down the rest of the team. The next month, Yoder Begley said Salazar told her that her laugh was annoying him and other runners. Then, she said, he asked her to sign a contract stating that she would not befriend other athletes on the team. Other Oregon project athletes were not asked to sign the contract, as she was led to believe they would.

“He told me I should think of my teammates as business acquaintances,” she said.

At a training camp in Park City, Utah, ahead of the 2008 United States Olympic trials, Salazar weighed Yoder Begley in front of Goucher and Goucher’s husband, Adam, a fellow runner. Seeing her weight was 116 pounds, Salazar told Yoder Begley she had blown her shot to make the Olympic team. When Yoder Begley left the room, Kara Goucher said, Salazar turned to her and Adam and ridiculed Yoder Begley.

“I feel bad that I didn’t stand up for her, and I didn’t because I was just glad it was not me,” Kara Goucher said.

At the trials one week later, Yoder Begley set a personal record in the 10,000 meters and made the Olympic team, along with Goucher. Both Goucher and Yoder Begley said Salazar and a top assistant, Darren Treasure, tried to pit the teammates against each other, telling Yoder Begley that Goucher did not want to room with her at the Beijing Olympics and Goucher that Yoder Begley resented her success. Treasure did not respond to requests for comment.

Once in Beijing, however, Yoder Begley crossed the finish line 26th in her race. At the end of the year, she said Salazar told her that making the Olympic team had been a fluke and that she could not expect to be an elite runner weighing 114 pounds.

She started dieting, but her weight remained largely the same, as she won national championships on the road at 15 kilometers and on the track at 10,000 meters. She set personal records at every distance from 800 meters to the half marathon.

There was a problem, though — she was starving herself, and when she took time off to rest, her weight shot up to 121 pounds. To Salazar, that was unacceptable.

Yoder Begley proposed working with Krista Austin, a top nutritional physiologist who had worked with other American Olympians. Salazar agreed, but gave Austin only two weeks to make progress.

In an interview this week, Austin said it was a tight timeline, but Yoder Begley quickly improved. Austin decreased Yoder Begley’s calorie intake and set up a more nutritious meal plan. The pounds came off.

Within months, Yoder Begley set her personal record in the 5,000 meters, dropping below 15 minutes.

Despite the improvement, Yoder Begley said, Salazar continued to express skepticism of Austin’s work and comment about how much Yoder Begley was eating whenever she had a subpar workout. Slow times generated comments about her legs and her backside, she said, or got her sent for a weigh-in.

Then, after a few intense speed workouts, Yoder Begley’s injuries returned, culminating in Achilles’ surgery in the summer of 2010.

The next year, her other Achilles’ tendon acted up, a new ache that joined nagging injuries to her hip and foot.

After she finished sixth at the 2011 outdoor track and field national championships, Salazar told her she had “the biggest butt on the start line” and removed her from the team. At the time, she said, she weighed 112 pounds. Her body composition was comparable to what it had been when she finished sixth in the world in 2009.

That didn’t matter. Nike cut Yoder Begley’s funding and cut her in 2012. Her career as an elite runner was over, her body and spirit broken a little more than two years after her best performances.

“She had one amazing year with the Oregon Project, but at what cost?” Goucher said.

Now Yoder Begley is focused on how she can benefit from the experience. “My hope is that by coming forward we can learn how we can talk about these subjects,” she said. “We need to find a way.”