Track Coach Alberto Salazar’s Four-Year Doping Ban Upheld By CAS

Salazar is a former coach of the Nike Oregon Project and is also appealing a lifetime ban from the U.S. Center for SafeSport for sexual and emotional misconduct.

Associated Press | Sep 16, 2021

Track Coach Alberto Salazar’s Four-Year Doping Ban Upheld By CAS /

Track coach Alberto Salazar received no relief from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which upheld his four-year ban for a series of doping-related violations that had long been pursued by American regulators.

A person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press on Wednesday the bans for both Salazar and endocrinologist Jeffrey Brown, first passed down in 2019, had been upheld. The person did not want to be identified before CAS published the decision of its three judges.

That followed Thursday from the court in Switzerland, which confirmed its panel rejected two appeals — the combined Salazar and Brown challenge to their four-year bans and a request by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for longer sanctions.

The judges confirmed Salazar had broken anti-doping rules and had been banned in line with current guidance, but they were unimpressed with how the case was handled over several years.

The court said in a statement “the way in which the case was conducted by USADA and that the evidence was presented and, in some cases, later abandoned, seemed to be out of proportion and excessive when compared to the severity and consequences of the (violations) that have been established.”

Salazar is the former marathon champion who, as coach of the Nike Oregon Project, trained a long list of championship distance runners including Mo Farah, Galen Rupp and, for a time, Kara Goucher. None of his former runners have been charged with doping violations.

Tipped off by Goucher and others, the USADA investigated Salazar and the running team for about six years before handing down sanctions in 2019.

Among Salazar’s practices, according to the USADA investigation, was sending athletes to Brown’s office to be infused with a supplement called L-carnitine at doses that surpassed allowable thresholds; the coach also experimented on his sons using testosterone gels.

Salazar has proclaimed he did nothing wrong. He did not immediately respond to an email sent late Wednesday night by AP.

The upholding of the doping ban might not have any practical effect on the 63-year-old coach, who is appealing a lifetime ban handed down earlier this summer by the U.S. Center for SafeSport for sexual and emotional misconduct.

In 2019, a handful of runners, including Goucher, Mary Cain, and Amy Yoder Begley revealed that they had been emotionally and physically abused while working with Salazar as part of the NOP, which was disbanded shortly after the doping ban was revealed.

Arbitrators who decided the case in USADA’s favor during the appeal that led to the 2019 decision said that in addition to the L-carnitine infusions, there were “numerous other examples of this type of ‘medical’ direction in the record of this case.” The directions involved calcium supplements, anti-inflammatories, sleep medication and the consistent pushing of thyroid medicine that is often used to increase metabolism and control weight.

The CAS and SafeSport decisions appear to be career enders for Salazar, who won four major marathon titles in New York and Boston in the early ’80s, then went on to found NOP, which stood as one of the world’s most-renowned track clubs for nearly two decades.

Olympic champions who have trained at NOP include Sifan Hassan, who won the women’s 5,000 and 10,000 meters at the Tokyo Olympics, four-time gold medalist Farah — who completed the men’s 5,000-10,000 double at London in 2012 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016 — and Matthew Centrowitz Jr., who took the men’s 1,500 title at Rio.

The CAS judges repeated that none of Salazar’s rule-breaking that they had seen “directly affected athletic competition.”

“(T)here was no evidence put before the CAS as to any effect on athletes competing at the elite level within the NOP,” the court said.

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Published Sep 16, 2021

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