Win at All Costs

August 15, 2020
Buckle up for a wild ride through athletics, doping, and the hard-driving company paying $500 million to brand the U.S. track and field team until at least 2040. Nike, writes freelance journalist Hart, is "possibly the most recognizable brand on the planet, and its co-founder Phil Knight is one of the richest men to have ever lived, with a net worth estimated by Forbes of $35 billion." The company is a marketing juggernaut particularly adept at getting famous athletes to wear their apparel and gear so the rest of us will buy it. The magic continues to work despite major scandals involving Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong. There's a lot going on in this lengthy book--sometimes too much--but for the most part, the author succeeds in telling an exciting story of business and athletic malfeasance. He diligently follows the rise and fall of Alberto Salazar, the coach of the company's secret running program, the Nike Oregon Project. Despite widespread evidence of doping and abundant whistleblowing, Salazar received only a four-year ban in 2019. Hart is the perfect person to tell the tale; in 2017, someone leaked him the Salazar doping report, and the New York Times asked him to write it up. He recounts the long process of tracking Salazar's activities, as he continued to stuff his athletes with all manner of drugs while bending the rules to their breaking points--e.g., having them diagnosed with hypothyroidism by his pet endocrinologist so they could take "off-label...prescription drugs as performance enhancers." At one point in his career, distance runner Mo Farah was taking 100,000 IUs of vitamin D per week (recommended weekly intake is 4,200), plus calcitonin, a bone strengthener; ferrous sulfate, an iron supplement; and L-carnitine infusions. Even if the penalty for Salazar was meager, the stakes remain high, and Hart successfully uncovers an unsettling, aggressive corporate culture. A touch overlong, but a deeply reported and revealing look at the dire commercialization of American sports.

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December 14, 2020
In this probing debut, journalist Hart discusses the rise and fall of the Nike Oregon Project, a professional training program for Nike-sponsored track stars that shut down in 2019 after its coach, Alberto Salazar, was banned from sports for four years by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Hart shares how Salazar regularly arranged for runners to get prescriptions for hormones and steroids, as well as performance-boosting thyroid medications, the side-effects of which included irregular heart rhythms and bone thinning. In addition, Salazar’s grueling training regimen featured 130-mile-per-week running schedules and low-oxygen living quarters that boosted red blood cell counts but left athletes feeling faint and exhausted. Chilling tales from rail-thin female runners whom he emotionally brutalized into losing weight abound; Olympic runner Amy Begley (5’4” and ranging from 106 to 116 lbs.) shares, “If I had a bad workout on a Tuesday, he would tell me how flabby I looked and send me to get weighed. Then, three days later, I would have a great workout and would tell me how lean I looked.” Hart’s particularly talented when it comes to creating disquieting portraits of the runners, whose desperation to win is palpable on the page. This revelatory exposé wows.