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When American sweetheart, world-beating sprinter, and Nike athlete Marion Jones admitted in 2007 to using steroids, the public began to understand just how pervasive illicit drug use in athletics had become. Although Jones was never charged with a performance-enhancing drug offense, investigators learned that she was getting PEDs from the same source used by several Major League Baseball players, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). Her case proved that cheating had progressed to the point where chemists were making designer steroids undetectable to drug tests. 메이저사이트

In 2013, Lance Armstrong drove that point home as he told some of the truth in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. According to a USADA report, through the early aughts Armstrong and his teammates had been running “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program the sport has ever seen.” Armstrong often used drug testing itself as a shield, claiming that he was tested so often he must be clean or he would have gotten caught. He was also one of the first, and certainly the most prominent, to publicly disparage the anti-doping agencies, saying they were targeting him because they needed a high-profile athlete in their trophy case to justify their jobs and their funding. What was clear was that drug testing was not sensitive or technologically advanced enough to catch well-funded cheaters determined to evade anti-doping authorities.

Lance Armstrong admits to doping in a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey.

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As testing improved and Armstrong took his pyrotechnic fall from grace, some athletes and their coaches turned to doctors’ offices, seeking help from physicians who plumbed lists of allowed medications for anything that might endow an off-label benefit to athletic performance.

As evidence of advanced doping began to hit the headlines in 2013—most notably in a Wall Street Journal story titled “U.S. Track’s Unconventional Physician”—Nike’s highest-profile coach, the Nike Oregon Project’s Alberto Salazar, and his team physician, Dr. Jeffrey Brown, came under greater scrutiny. A 2015 investigation by the BBC and ProPublica followed with allegations by former Oregon Project employees and athletes of Salazar experimenting with testosterone and pressuring athletes to take unnecessary prescription drugs to boost performance. (Brown was not mentioned in the story.) Both men were eventually banned from sport by USADA for four years in 2019—Brown for administration of a prohibited method, and Salazar for administration of a prohibited method, trafficking in testosterone, and tampering with the anti-doping process.

In a statement on the now-defunct Nike Oregon Project website, Salazar responded to the ban saying, “I am shocked by the outcome today. Throughout this six-year investigation my athletes and I have endured unjust, unethical and highly damaging treatment from USADA.” (In 2021, Salazar was also banned from sport for life by the U.S. Center for SafeSport for “sexual misconduct” and emotional misconduct for his treatment of women on the team.)

Alberto Salazar watches the mens 10,000m at the 2015 USATF Outdoor Championships.

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It was against this background that Houlihan’s running team, the Nike-sponsored Bowerman Track Club (BTC), operated on the brand’s plush corporate campus in Beaverton, Oregon. After Salazar survived a heart attack in 2007, he hired Jerry Schumacher as his eventual Oregon Project replacement. But the two coaches clashed and Nike allowed Schumacher to leave and helm his own team, the BTC, while Salazar continued on with his Oregon Project.

Schumacher’s athletes described him as someone who doesn’t chase scientifically suspect chemicals or techniques and instead sticks to the basics of good hard training followed by appropriate rest. And unlike Salazar, they say Schumacher doesn’t entangle himself in his athletes’ medical appointments or advise them on which prescription drugs to seek out.

“I am vehemently against doping. I would support lifetime bans,” Schumacher told me. “I’ve had too many athletes that have been robbed by cheaters.”

As tests have become more sensitive, now regularly measuring down to the picogram (one-trillionth of a gram), cases involving contamination through sex, meat, and medication have resulted in no-fault findings by authorities. This is ostensibly good for the fight against doping, but the increase in sensitivity comes with inherent risk to clean athletes. The research on all the possible permutations of these situations and substances has not progressed as fast as the technology.