Wherein I address a remarkably stupid question

Unless you just woke up from a coma, you know enough about the Nike Oregon Project mess -- although I prefer at this point to call it the Alberto Salazar scandal -- so that I don't need to offer even a cursory description.

Although the story broke over two weeks ago, the hits keep coming unabated; practically every day, someone new who has had professional dealings with Salazar steps in to offer his or her thoughts and experiences, none of which have made the formerly bombastic, now-silent NOP coach look any better.

A number of observers are convinced that those stepping into the fray now are simply self-serving publicity whores -- runners whose athletic careers are either in decline or finished and who therefore can't help but compensate for this grim reality by making noise that is either unwarranted or too much after the fact to be meaningful.

I have had discussions with some of the players here ranging from superficial to extensive, but that's not really relevant. I trust my own understanding of basic human psychology enough to dismiss this as mindless bullshit.


I would bet anyone anything "bandwagon jumpers" are not chiefly or even strongly motivated by self-promotion. In other areas, sure, some of all of them could be. But I'm not seeing this here. What would they see as their reward, other than getting pat on the back for being courageous?

Far more probable is that they simply feel more emboldened every time a new accuser comes forward with a story similar to his or her own. This would hold true whether or not those coming forward in some cases have something ignoble about their own TUE/doping history, which, unfortunately, does seem likely.

The claim that it was inherently wrong for the Nike athletes who years ago suspected doping or related wrongdoing in the NOP to continue cashing Nike's checks is tenuous at best. Maybe in an ideal world every one of us reports every serious infraction we see being committed in real time, but come on. I don't think it was in any one of these runners' contracts to do anything besides show up at a given set or number of races and try to compete with distinction. It's pretty easy to sit back and speculate that someone should have just pissed away her livelihood without hesitation in the name of a cleaner sport, especially given that none of these athletes had definitive evidence of chicanery and knew that they didn't.

And for the umpteenth time: Even if one concedes that Fleshman, the Gouchers, Rohatinsky, etc. etc. are 100 percent about dancing in the spotlight, that is utterly irrelevant to the facts of the situation. If someone donates $10 million toward the construction a new oncology wing in a hospital, does it matter in the end if the gift comes from an anonymous donor or from a yammering megalomaniac like Donald Trump? Not to the cancer patients.

As I expected, I'm taking a far stronger interest in the "meta" aspects if this than in the central issue of who took what kind of drugs and when. Those details are unlikely to ever reach the public with any reliability, and for my part my opinions Salazar seem more or less immutable at this point. What is intriguing is watching people perform insanely convoluted rhetorical and cognitive gymnastics in an effort to cling to conclusions that no amount of evidence will budge them from anyway. It doesn't say much about we humans as thinkers, but if you take a step back, it's a hell of an amusing show.