Introduction
Mary Cain’s male coaches were convinced she had to get “thinner, and thinner, and thinner.” Then her body started breaking down.
At 17, Mary Cain was already a record-breaking phenom: the fastest girl in a generation, and the youngest American runner to turn professional. In 2013, she was signed by the best track team in the world, Nike’s Oregon Project, run by its star coach Alberto Salazar.
Then everything collapsed. Her fall was just as spectacular as her rise, and she shares that story for the first time in the Video Op-Ed above.
Instead of becoming a symbol of girls’ unlimited potential in sports, Cain became yet another standout young athlete who got beaten down by a win-at-all-costs culture. Girls like Cain become damaged goods and fade away. We rarely hear what happened to them. We move on.
The problem is so widespread it affected the only other female athlete featured in the last Nike video ad Cain appeared in, the figure skater Gracie Gold. When the ad came out in 2014, like Cain, Gold was a prodigy considered talented enough to win a gold medal at the next Olympics. And, like Cain, Gold got caught in a system where she was compelled to become thinner and thinner. She developed disordered eating to the point of imagining her own death.
“America loves a good child prodigy story, and business is ready and waiting to exploit that story, especially when it comes to girls,” said Lauren Fleshman, who ran for Nike until 2012. “When you have these kinds of good girls, girls who are good at following directions to the point of excelling, you’ll find a system that’s happy to take them. And it’s rife with abuse.”
We don’t typically hear from the casualties of these systems — the girls who tried to make their way in this system until their bodies broke down and they left the sport. It’s easy to focus on bright new stars, while forgetting about those who disappeared. We fetishize these athletes, but we don’t protect them. If they fail to pull off what we expect them to, we abandon them.
But Mary Cain’s story isn’t over. By speaking out, she’s making sure of that.
Read the story here: nyti.ms/34DgcNu
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Video
I was the fastest girl in america.
There are women here almost twice her age being left in hallway.
I set many national records, and I was a straight a student when I was 16, I got a call from alberto salazar at nike.
He was the world's most famous track coach.
And he told me, I was the most talented athlete he'd ever seen during my freshman year in college.
I moved out to train with him and his team full time at nike world headquarters.
It was a team of the fastest athletes in the world.
And it was a dream come true.
I joined nike because I wanted to be the best female athlete ever instead.
I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by alberto and endorsed by nike.
This is what happened to me when I first arrived, an all-male, nike staff became convinced that in order for me to get better.
I had to become thinner and thinner and thinner this.
Nike team was the top running program in the country.
And yet we had no certified sports psychologist.
There was no certified nutritionist.
It was really just a bunch of people who were alberto's friends.
So when I went to anybody for help, they would always just tell me the same thing.
And that was to listen to alberto.
Alberta was constantly trying to get me to lose weight.
He created an arbitrary number of 114 pounds.
And he would usually weigh me in front of my teammates and publicly shame me if I wasn't hitting weight, 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.
It reached a point where I was on the starting line, and I'd lost the race before I started because in my head, all I was thinking of was not the time I was trying to hit.
But the number on the scale I saw earlier that day, it would be naive to not acknowledge the fact that weight is important in sports it's like boxers need to maintain a certain weight, or you know, everybody always ends up citing the math about how the thinner you are the faster you're going to run, because you have to carry less weight.
But here's a biology lesson, I learned the hard way when young women are forced to push themselves beyond what they're capable at their given age they're at risk for developing reds.
Suddenly you realize you've lost your period for a couple months.
And then a couple months becomes a couple years.
And in my case, it was a total of three.
And if you're not getting your period, you're, not going to be able to have the necessary levels of estrogen to maintain strong bone health.
And in my case, I broke five different bones.
The new york times magazine, published a story about how alberto was training me and nurturing my talent we weren't doing any of that.
I felt so scared.
I felt so alone and I felt so trapped.
And I started to have suicidal thoughts.
I started to cut myself.
Some people saw me cutting myself and uh, sorry, um, nobody really did anything or said, anything, um.
So in 2015, I ran this race, and I didn't run super well.
And afterwards, there was a thunderstorm going on half the track was under one tent, um, alberta yelled at me in front of everybody else at the meet.
And he told me that I clearly gained five pounds before the race, um, it was also that night that I told alberto and our sports like that I was cutting myself, and they pretty much told me they just wanted to go to bed.
And I think for me that was my kick in the head where I was like this system is sick.
I think even for my parents in certain ways once I finally vocalized to them.
I mean, they were horrified.
They bought me the first plane ride home, and they were like get on that flight get the hell out of there.
I wasn't even trying to make the olympics anymore.
I was just trying to survive.
So I made the painful choice and I quit the team after a multi-year investigation, the u.s anti-doping agency has banned alberto salazar from the sport for four years.
Nike will shut down the oregon project.
Nike ceo, mark parker, stepping down from the company in january of 2020.
Those reforms are mostly a direct result of the doping scandal, they're, not acknowledging the fact that there's a systemic crisis in women's sports.
And at nike in which young girls bodies are being ruined by an emotionally and physically abusive system, that's, what needs to change and here's how we can do it.
First nike needs to change in track and field.
Nike is all powerful.
They control the top coaches athletes, races, even the governing body.
You can't just fire a coach and eliminate a program and pretend the problem is solved.
My worry is that nike is merely going to rebrand the old program and put alberto's old assistant coaches in charge.
Secondly, we need more women in power part of me wonders.
If I had worked with more female, psychologists nutritionists and even coaches where I'd be today.
I got caught in a system designed by and for men, which destroys the bodies of young girls, rather than force young girls to fend for themselves.
We have to protect them.
I genuinely do have hope for the sport, and I plan to be running for many years to come.
And so part of the reason I'm doing this.
Now is I want to end this chapter.
And I want to start a new one you.
