Tastes Like Chicken wrote:
middle school bully wrote:
Imagine if we got sued for every fat girl we came across in the middle school hallway. Good thing we don't have billions or those fat girls would come crying to a judge to get them a piece.
Hardly. Cain's case is based on the fact that Salazar was not some random bully but her coach. She claims that because he was her coach, he had a legal duty to treat her better than he did.
You can think the underlying law is bad, that the law suit is frivolous, or that Salazar should win, but you shouldn't get confused about the legal basis for the case.
Your claim is as irrelevant as a Cain supporter claiming that if Cain loses, female athletes will be slaves, or some such.
I read the case pretty carefully through p. 14, when my eyes began to cross. It's a substantial, well thought-through case, but the A through V list of charges against Salazar and the A through Whatever list of injuries and problems that Cain claims to have suffered as a result seems a little over the top.
I suspect that the legal strategy is precisely to over charge, over-claim, by piling a lot of stuff on. That gives the judge (and kibbitzers like me) a chance to say, "Whoa whoa: SOME of this makes sense, but other stuff is just crazy."
The duty of care charges are interesting. I tend to think that they're most compelling when the focus strictly on the physical stuff--like telling her to eat less but not letting a professional nutritionist help make those decisions. That actually sounds actionable. The less impressive stuff, by contrast, at least to me, is where she's moaning about the fact that, in effect, he wasn't nice to her.
Who the f do you think Alberto Salazar was and is? I remember his rep from the early 80s, around the time he suddenly erupted into view in the NY Marathon. (I came out onto the street and watched him flow by that day....the Central Park road around 96th St.) He was a guy who won because he beat himself into the ground and was, like Pre, willing to hurt worse than those he beat. He was the OG beast. I remember my Princeton roomates, top runners, talking about him back in 78-79. There was this guy up in Massachusetts, they said. Just an animal.
That's who he is. I'm not the slightest bit surprised, or disllusioned ("Oh my! What a HORRIBLE man!!") at what is revealed (or at least alleged) in this lawsuit. I'm not the slightest bit surprised that he talked obsessively about Cain's fat bottom (as he characterized it) and whatever else he did. Some coaches are nice, supportive, warm & runny. Cain surely knew, long before she arrived, that he was going to drive her hard. Does she bear ANY responsibility, at all, for having stayed once she realized what being coached by AlSal actually meant?
One fair question is: Does any of the abuse seem as though it WASN'T motivated, however fairly or unfairly, by a hard-driving, not-nice coach's desire to whip the best possible performances out of her? There's excessive and then there's pointedly sadistic. Sure, he was excessive by most standards. But was it done--or can his lawyers argue that it was all done--out of a good faith desire to produce excellence?
I think that the lawyers will sort this out. But I'd be wary, given what I read, of absolving Cain, even though she was young, from all responsibility for her choice to stay. Did whatever contract she'd signed have an exit clause? What sort of behavior on Salazar's part would have constituted actionable breach of contact such that she could have walked? COULD she have invoked breach of contract and walked? If so, why didn't she?
I suspect the lawyers will be arguing about that .