Excellent comic timing

I haven't read this story yet and was just alerted to the headline. My own headline derives from the fact that the IAAF World Athletics Championships are being contested this week in Doha, Qatar, probably among the least hospitable heavily populated environments on Earth for non-sadists to stage distance races. My own motivation for seeing renewables replace oil, which won't ever happen, has little to do with the environment and everything to do with driving these nations into sufficient financial ruin to prevent world-class athletes from training full-time for four years to run a 10,000-meter final at 11 p.m. when it's still hot enough to fry the corners of your own balls on the track if you seat yourself just so.

It's important to throw out some of my initial reactions without assimilating or even perusing the details of the story, because I wasn't sure what exactly these reactions would be if the sport ever got around to sanctioning Alberto Salazar's program for perpetrating Trump-caliber excesses in plain view. (Well, it appears that my first reaction among these initial reactions is to liken the ethics of the Nike Oregon Project to that of the current White House. That doesn't feel like an inner conflict, praise Jesus.)
Besides, it's been a while since I rapped at ya, and if I weren't waiting on one thing I consider somewhat important by my standards, I would have posted a lengthy, tedious, and somehow captivating string of paragraphs at least a week and a half ago that would have included no distinguishing features except for exactly one strategic use of a word or phrase guaranteed to spike someone's blood pressure -- not always the same person of even an identifiable one at all. So this gives me an excuse to make one last Septemb...nah, not gonna make it at this rate.
So, Salazar probably hasn't been caught doing anything the public didn't already know or have good reason to suspect, and instead is being formally sanctioned at last, just as the chief superstars of the program are probably closing out their careers. To me, all that's really changed is that the Nike Oregon Project is likely to fold. Everyone who has long believed the stories of the Gouchers, Steve Magness and others might feel idly vindicated, but anyone who believed up to this point that Salazar wasn't running an at-all-costs human performance lab up there isn't living in reality and will probably just start unspooling offenses that USADA and USATF didn't find and weren't looking for, like an ergonomic meth lab in the shape of a Mobot. Human stupidity, like life itself (at least according to Ian Malcolm) always finds a way to propagate itself through any medium and in the face of any logical challenges.
After Pro Publica/BBC broke the story in June 2015 and Salazar responded two weeks later with a piss-pot spatter of a rebuttal boldly posted on Nike's own website, I analyzed this "open letter" and concluded that Salazar was feigning transparency in regard to his communications with Kara Goucher about her weight in the winter of 2011. It seemed extremely likely from Salazar's own statements that he had, as Kara claimed, instructed her (maybe via his thoroughly disturbing-looking endocrinologist-for-hire, Jeffrey Brown, also now suspended for four years) months earlier than he admitted to add a thyroid med she didn't have a prescription for to an existing thyroid med, which is great weight-loss advice if, again, your ethics allow you to dispense of trivialities such as athlete trust, athlete long-term health, etc. On that matter, I wrote specifically about the alarming prevalence of supposed thyroid problems in Salazar's runners, noting that he seemed oddly encouraged tat his athletes experienced clinical hypothyroidism a rate 40 times greater than the population at large. I also summed up my thoughts on the letter, which haven't changed, here.
I don't have anything resembling a personal stake in Salazar's nominal exit from the sport, but I've interacted with various people involved in both the NOP's rise and its likely -- and again, I'm assuming -- dissolution within the next twelve months, and consider several of them friends of long standing. These friends aren't all on the same side of this. Also, while this is somewhat petty, Alberto's suspicion-bordering-on-paranoia cost me two agreed-upon interviews over the years, one in 2008 with Galen Rupp for the New York Road Runners and the other in 2012 with Mary Cain for Competitor, with Alberto canceling both at the last minute. In the first instance, some flack in the U. of Oregon sports information office kept asking me exactly what I wanted to ask while I could hear Salazar and Rupp yammering in the background, and I gave up and said I'd try later. After consulting with my editor, I didn't. In the second case, attuned to his mercurial ways, I had even given him the questions I planned to ask in advance. I guess that adds up to about $350 in lost income. Boo-hoo. I just wish he hadn't been such a damn secretive bastard, like he was hiding something; concealing something from the world in general, and from media types who wanted to talk to his youngest, most naive athletes and write about those conversations in particular. I'm also not sure how much more helpful it would have been trying to talk to the cardboard cut-out in human form named Galen Rupp over the phone than it would have been in person, anyway.
First, I have known (or had every reason to believe) that Salazar himself was a doped athlete for parts of two distinct centuries. Over 20 years ago, someone with direct ties to the Nike Athletics West program in the late 1970s and early 1980s sent me an unsolicited message containing a version of this document along with some florid supporting details. He described the parking lot of a particular endocrinologist named in that document as a veritable who's-who of U.S. distance talent at the time, and even expressed consternation that some of the "patients" were limited to stanozolol (Winstrol or "Winnie the Pill") while the Boston and New York marathon golden boy was afforded the heavier-hitting anabolic steroid oxandrolone (Anavar).
So when I learned that Nike was centering an effort aimed at getting as many world and national records and Olympic and World Championship medals as possible, it was essentially a given that athletes in the program would at a minimum be compelled to enter "grey areas," most likely as a Trojan horse for "areas so devoid of light even Donald Trump's soul is barred from entry."
In 2013, someone who'd been a centerpiece of what remains my favorite piece of work for a print running magazine joined the NOP. This was at age 28, after she'd already been to two Olympics and claimed a bronze in what was then her signature event, the 1,500 meters. Under Salazar, she set two American records, one of which still stands, and became one of the most successful American middle-distance runners of all time. Sometime along the way, one of the figures in the Pro Publica story posted a comment about Rupp to one of my Facebook posts, and someone close to the above-mentioned female athlete took exception to it, and in fact blamed me for it. I had already mostly lost touch with this athlete thanks to the basic passage of time and the vicissitudes of life, but I'll always remember taking a little satisfaction in learning that someone's mom had sprung for a dozen copies of the magazine carrying an article about her daughter, one that was still on newsstands when this runner ran away with the first Olympic Trials 1,500-meter final she was ever in in 2008. I mean, at some point, all those words have to mean something.
Before today, there was more about Salazar's own conduct as an athlete in the public domain besides the stuff journalists dug up for their 2015 stories and randos in Oregon assembled over time. For example, see pages 13 and 14 of this document, uploaded to the Web in May 2017. But I don't how even those unfamiliar with Salazar's past or for whatever reason optimistic about his practices could view his essential conduct over the years as anything other then being aimed solely at attracting top talent and milking the absolute most of it far all manner of gain. In this sense, given the resources at his disposal and his own inherent disinclination toward being impeded by troublesome rules, he has done his job masterfully. Anyone who says he's a bad coach is arguably correct on countless moral grounds, but a computer program would probably give him the highest possible rating.
When the facts were first coming out, Salazar had a lot of his fanboys in Boston, where people are possibly more stubborn to give up on their heroes than maybe any other metro area in the country, sticking up for him in the face of what any objective observer had to be consider damning evidence of malfeasance, however circumstantial -- and that's if you ignore the persistent reality that doping goes on all the goddamn time in this sport. Something people who might be persuaded by truth fail to keep in mind is that it only takes one credible story of villain-hood to establish a villain. Salazar used the simpleton's tool of finding examples of ways in which he obviously didn't cheat, something simpletons and people motivated to reject sound evidence fall for. Simpletons and people who either cheat with aplomb themselves, approve of cheating authority figures or both at last notice made up the majority of the U.S. citizenry.

It's tempting to offer the position of head coach of a high-level fitness enterprise on the Portland Craigslist.
These are obviously more than passing thoughts, but I still haven't read a word of the article. I'm going to assume that the punishment amount to next to nothing in practice. A ban on a coach is clearly not the same as a ban on an athlete. Salazar is not going to be living in a van down by the Willamette River.
Who knows what he really thinks. Maybe he figures, "I used some of that junk and I'm still here, heart attacks and all, praise God, and I didn't lose a single record, title or medal. These men and ladies will be alive at sixty, and no one's coming for their medal haul, either." Or something like that. The important thing to remember is that Salazar almost certainly believes everyone else in the world is cheating, and he's probably not overshooting the mark by much. If doping to keep up were all he were doing wrong, I wouldn't even think special ill of him -- that is, anyone who coaches at that level is conceding to the realities of PEDs and is therefore arguably corrupt for even wanting to even enter the game, but I would never argue that his methods are uniquely scurrilous in their direct application or unusually derelict in the human element. But it's never been possible to like him as a person even apart from this, if there even is an "apart from," and without knowing the severity of his punishment, I'll leave it at that and swear not to come back and correct or otherwise edit anything after I've read the relevant article(s).