For Salazar Whistle-Blowers, a Long Wait for a Satisfying Outcome – The New York Times

For the men and women in the Nike Oregon Project who became whistle-blowers in the case against Alberto Salazar, it has been a long 10 years.

They have been ridiculed, castigated and dismissed, as those who take on people in positions of power often are. Then, last Monday, some measure of validation finally arrived. After a six-year investigation that included a two-year legal battle, the United States Anti-Doping Agency suspended Salazar, the coach and famed former runner, for four years, along with Jeffrey Brown, a Houston endocrinologist who treated many of the project’s top runners.

It was a stunning downfall for Salazar, who has dominated distance running for decades, first as a champion runner, then as a coach tasked with developing champions for the world’s biggest sports apparel company. For those who blew the whistle and testified against Salazar, the suspension landed with a thud. No sense of joy or triumph; rather, a moment to consider the mess that was made of their lives.

“It’s been an emotional and heavy last few weeks,” said Kara Goucher, an Olympian who once regarded Salazar as a father figure, then went to the F.B.I. and USADA in 2011 when she could no longer stomach tactics that she believed constituted cheating.

“I’m certainly not overjoyed,” said Steve Magness, the cross-country coach at the University of Houston. He served as an assistant coach and the top scientist at the Oregon Project in 2010 and 2011, then left an operation that he believed was breaking the rules.

The friendships and career opportunities lost and the public abuse taken may ultimately have been worth it, even if the arbitration panel that sided with USADA over Salazar did not have enough information to uphold some of the specific allegations.

Danny Mackey, coach of the elite Brooks Beast training group and a former scientist at Nike who sounded the alarm by calling USADA in 2009, has asked himself whether he would do it all over again. He said the stress of testifying and the threats from a former colleague led to panic attacks and the breakup of his marriage.

Yet he eventually came back to this: “Not doing it is not an option because what was going on goes against everything I believe in in sport.”

Salazar has denied that he broke antidoping rules. He has vowed to appeal his suspension. His 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. Nike, too has denied wrongdoing.

In an email to the The New York Times on Saturday, Salazar said that after hearing testimony from Mackey, Magness and Goucher, “the panel clearly found I did not administer any banned substances (including testosterone) or use any banned method with any Oregon Project athlete. They found that I was prescribed testosterone for my own medical use and that I did not use it in connection with training Oregon Project athletes.”

In a statement after the initial ruling, Salazar said the six-year investigation into the Oregon Project had subjected him and his athletes to “unjust, unethical and highly damaging treatment from USADA.”

In announcing the penalty, USADA said its investigation included “eyewitness proof, testimonies, contemporaneous emails and patient records.”

USADA’s findings backed what the whistle-blowers characterized for investigators as unjust, unethical and highly damaging treatment of athletes.

Mackey, a competitive runner who made what seems to have been the first call to USADA, became concerned in 2008 when he was participating in sports science experiments with Nike researchers. A competitive runner, he was pushing his body to the limit in training and working full time as a Nike sports scientist.

In an interview, and according to a transcript of his testimony in the Salazar case reviewed by The Times, Mackey said he became worn down and went to see Loren Myhre, a top physiologist who worked at Nike. Myhre instructed him to go on a cycle of testosterone and thyroid medication to bring his hormone levels back up to normal and improve his energy. Mackey asked if that was cheating. According to the transcript, Myhre, who died in 2012, told Mackey that many of Salazar’s runners received similar treatment and did not get caught, so it must be legal. Mackey wasn’t so sure.

Then, in 2009, Mackey saw a laboratory report that included testosterone levels for athletes. He believed that the levels for certain Oregon Project runners appeared artificially inflated. He shared the results with a friend who was a physician who said he suspected the athletes were boosting their hormone levels by using small doses of testosterone to avoid getting caught, according to his testimony.

Almost immediately, Mackey called USADA and shared his observations. He remained at Nike, nervously, for another 18 months, then left to work at another shoe company that promised to raise his yearly salary to $75,000, from $48,000.

In his email, Salazar reiterated that the panel did not find that he administered testosterone to any Oregon Project athlete, though it did find that he did explore ways to use medication to elevate testosterone levels.

For years, Mackey never knew if his call to USADA had generated any action. Now it’s clear that it did.

In 2011, Goucher went to the F.B.I. with accusations of foul play at the Oregon Project. Her suspicions had been growing for years. In testimony during the USADA investigations and the hearings, she claimed there were tubes of testosterone-laced AndroGel lying around the condominium where she and other runners stayed while training in Park City, Utah, and syringes in the refrigerator. She said Salazar told her that the AndroGel was for his heart condition and that the syringes were for the asthma medication of a teammate, Galen Rupp. Rupp has never failed a drug test and has repeatedly denied using performance-enhancing drugs.

“I never did an infusion, I never did EPO, I was not part of a testosterone experiment,” Goucher said during a phone interview from her Colorado home on Friday. “I was a part of a culture that was so manipulative and so controlling and so wrong.”

Goucher reached her breaking point during a comeback after the birth of her son. She said Salazar advised her to see Brown, the Houston endocrinologist, to get Cytomel, a prescription thyroid medication that he said would help her lose weight. When she resisted, he got a dose of the drug from another runner and tried to give it to her. That put her over the edge, she recounted in her testimony.

In response to this, Salazar wrote, “During the hearing my lawyers rightfully pointed out the shifting stories Kara told the panel and ultimately, after a full hearing, the panel found no violations based on her testimony.”

In fact, the panel found that Salazar and Brown “shared information with the aim of improving the athletes’ performance via medical intervention, with a particular interest in increasing testosterone levels.” The panel wrote that Salazar, who is not a doctor, admitted distributing prescription drugs and prescription doses of vitamin D to Oregon Project athletes.

Once in contact with the authorities, Goucher learned that she had actually been on a list of athletes suspected of doping, probably because Mackey had reported her and others as having suspiciously high testosterone levels. She said she had never taken an illegal substance, but acknowledged that she did have elevated testosterone.

“I don’t have to shave my face, but I think if you tested a lot of elite female athletes, many would have higher than normal levels,” she said.

USADA had Goucher’s so-called blood passport, which establishes baseline hormone levels for each athlete, and her testosterone readings had remained consistent. Just to be safe, she gathered all the information Nike had collected from her blood tests since she first arrived there in 2004.

And yet after Goucher went public with her complaint, she said people called her a liar and said she must have been cheating, too, since she achieved her top performances while training under Salazar. She lost sponsorships.

“This is why people don’t come forward,” she said. “Look, I believe in testing, but testing is not catching people. It comes down to people saying, ‘I saw this.’ We need to change the culture of people being vilified for coming forward and start listening to them.”

In May 2018, Goucher sat in a conference room in downtown Los Angeles and testified against her former coach. Salazar sat a few feet away, surrounded by his wife and at least five lawyers.

During Goucher’s cross-examination, Salazar’s lawyers portrayed her as the bitter and unstable spouse of Adam Goucher, a former elite runner who had a long-running feud with Salazar. The lawyers played a tape of a profanity-filled interview Kara Goucher gave in 2016 after the Olympic Trials marathon, in which she finished fourth, one spot away from making the United States team.

“It’s true,” she said. Her husband and Salazar did not get along, and sometimes she used foul language. That did not make her testimony any less true, she said.

Magness first had his reputation and integrity attacked by Salazar in 2015, shortly after ProPublica and the BBC published his allegations about his tenure with the Oregon Project. Salazar and his legal team pushed back through a 28-page online post. Magness later testified that top runners at the Oregon Project continually had their blood tested so Salazar could know whether they would fail drug tests at meets and races. Magness said — and USADA investigators found — that Salazar tested doses of testosterone by spreading the substance AndroGel on his son’s skin. Salazar has said that this was to determine how much AndroGel a rival might need to sabotage a run after a race. In his email Saturday, he stated that the panel “called out how I was extremely engaged with USADA and acted with caution and care to comply with the Code.”

The panel also stated that Salazar’s desire to provide the very best results and training for athletes under his care “clouded his judgment in some instances, when his usual focus on the rules appears to have lapsed.”

“I’ve just tried to compartmentalize everything,” Magness said. “Maybe because of what I did, others won’t have to deal with what I had to go through.”

Kara Goucher, too, is trying to be philosophical about coming forward, reflecting on her impact while weighing the personal downsides of her decision.

“I just finally realized that I am a part of the problem,” she said. “If I know this is going on and not helping the next generation, then what am I even doing?”

Goucher had hoped for a lifetime ban for Salazar. But his legal team had allowed him to survive for so long, she said, that “for him to serve any ban at all is a victory.”