Photo: Kevin Morris/Corbis via Getty
Runner Mary Cain, once the “fastest girl in America,” says that her former coach at the Nike Oregon Project forced her to lose weight and ignored her acts of self-harm.
Cain, 23, spoke out against coach Alberto Salazar in avideo forTheNew York Times, calling the program “an emotionally and physically abusive system.”
Cain, who set multiple U.S. junior records when she was in high school, left her hometown of Bronxville, New York tosign a professional contract with Nikeand the Oregon Project in 2013. There, she says, the “all-male” coaching staff “became convinced that in order for me to get better, I had to become thinner and thinner and thinner.”
Cain said that Nike did not have a certified sports psychologist nor a certified nutritionist, and that Salazar “created an arbitrary number of 114 lbs.” that he wanted her to weigh.
He “would usually weigh me in front of my teammates and publicly shame me if I wasn’t hitting weight,” she said. “He wanted to give me birth control pills and diuretics to lose weight — the latter of which isn’t allowed in track and field. I ran terrible during this time.”
Cain said that during her time with the Nike Oregon Project (NOP), she lost her period for three years — a syndrome calledexercise-induced amenorrhea, which causes a lack of estrogen and can lead to osteoporosis and bone density issues. Cain said that while at NOP, she “broke five different bones.”
Cain said that she started having suicidal thoughts and began cutting herself. She said, tearing up, that people at NOP saw her cut herself and “nobody really did anything or said anything.”
Mary Cain and Alberto Salazar in 2014.
Her breaking point, she said, came in 2015 after a race where she underperformed.
“Afterwards there was a thunderstorm going on. Half the track was under one tent and Alberto yelled at me in front of everybody else at the meet. He told me that I had clearly gained 5 lbs. before the race,” she said. “It was also that night that I told Alberto and our sports psych that I was cutting myself and they pretty much told me that they just wanted to go to bed.”
Cain left NOP soon after the incident with Salazar and returned home.
“I wasn’t even trying to make the Olympics anymore. I was just trying to survive,” she said. “So I made the painful choice and I quit the team.”
In a statement shared with PEOPLE, Nike said that they will investigate Cain’s allegations, but claimed that she had expressed interest in to coming back to NOP.
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Cain addressed that claimin a series of tweetson Friday morning, explaining that she “wanted closure.”
“I wanted closure, wanted an apology for never helping me when I was cutting, and in my own, sad, never-fully healed heart, wanted Alberto to still take me back. I still loved him. Because when we let people emotionally break us, we crave more than anything their very approval,” she wrote. But this summer, she said, they fell out of touch and when the doping allegations against Salazar came out, “that made the rose color glasses finally fall off.”
Cain has onlyraced a handful of timesin the three years since she left NOP, though she is beginning to return to professional running with a new coach. She said that “there is a systemic crisis in women’s sports and at Nike” that “needs to change.”
Cain said “we need more women in power.”
source: people.com
