pathfinder wrote:
Right.
He says things without thinking. Many, many times contradicting himself.
Here he was a few months ago:
Clearly laying the blame at Salazar's feet.
Now, he's making it seem like Salazar had little to do with it:
Yes, I blamed Salazar for overtraining her. The post-race workouts were insane. He was pushing her FAR too much, and it wasn't needed at all - she had so much talent and natural speed, he just had to keep her healthy which he failed to do. Had she gone to Tinman at 17 years old, she might have done better, but even that I can't guarantee (we would need to wait how Grace and Lauren Ping, Drew Hunter and Aidan Puffer are continuing to develop in the next years). Maybe there was just no way she could have made the Olympics despite her outstanding performances in high school.
This has nothing to do with Cain randomly accusing Salazar of emotional and physical abuse which is a crime and includes jail time as punishment. She joined Salazar with two wishes - "I want to break records and win medals". Salazar is a coach, and if he thought that losing weight will improve her performance, it's because he believed it would. He did NOT abuse or want to abuse his position as powerful, all-knowing elite coach, he just wanted to help her reach her goals. He failed with the training he gave her, and maybe with the strategies he employed to make her lose weight, but he treated her no different than any other elite he coached.
Cain was even less successful after she left NOP/Salazar. Her training under the new coach, which included high mileage as stated by herself, led to even more stress fractures and further performance decline. Everyone believes that she was at super low, unhealthy weight all the time at Salazar and after, which led to her injuries - but I have NEVER seen a pic where she looked heavily underweight, and I'm not even taking Koko as standard but any Olympic US runner. It is more likely that she gained her stress fractures and bone injuries from training TOO hard, first with Salazar, and then post-NOP era by herself/with her new coach and the high-mileage approach.
This year she was highly motivated again to compete at the highest level, and wanted to re-join Salazar and NOP as she thought it would be her best chance to become world-class again. After Salazar rejected her, she (rightfully!) felt very bad, he used her when she showed great promise, they were a great team (don't forget the initial successess/PRs in 2013 and 2014) and had a good relationship. Then, when she was just an above-average runner trying to get back and go to the top again, Salazar closed the doors in front of her and rejected her, as if she as person never meant anything to him and she was just a toy he wanted to use to win medals. Only THEN, and after Salazar was already damaged by the doping ban, she went public with her story and potentially exaggerated many things.
And she didn't even use a running community like letsrun to share her story - no, it had to go through the NYT, the biggest news media in the entire Western world. Think of the other side, Salazar who wakes up and reads this everywhere in the internet without having being given a chance to show his side of the story? I think this blew up WAY too fast, and WAY out of proportions, before really giving both sides a fair chance to state facts. We also need to get opinions from CURRENT (okay, that's not possible anymore but let's say recently active) NOP athletes on the culture, and not just those who departed with NOP in bad terms. Everything is VERY one-sided up until this point, I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but I think for fairness we need to get the opinion of more people and give both parties a chance to talk.