From Pre to Present: The Rise of U.S. Distance Running
From Pre to Present: The Rise of U.S. Distance Running
On the U.S.'s mission to catch East Africa, the man that led them, and the motives behind the company footing the bill.
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As the runners rounded into the home stretch, the 2024 Olympic men’s 1500m was still anyone’s to win. Reigning Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen led the pack, holding off world champion Josh Kerr on his right shoulder. With 100m meters to go, Kerr moved to pass, Ingebrigtsen shifted outside to cut him off, and the two were neck-and-neck in a sprint finish.
But in sliding right to block Kerr, Ingebrigtsen had left the inside lane open, and, seemingly out of nowhere, American Cole Hocker surged through. Hocker first passed Ingebrigtsen and then outkicked Kerr to win gold and set the Olympic record. It was the best race in U.S. distance history - also passing the fading Ingebrigtsen was fellow American Yared Nuguse to grab bronze, and the third American in the event, 21-year-old Hobbs Kessler, finished just behind Ingebrigtsen to place all three Americans in the top five. The dominance of the Americans was a statement that felt even more decisive when compared to the finish of the traditional 1500m powerhouse, the Kenyans, in 11th and 12th.
Indeed, the American triumph in the men’s 1500m is just the latest achievement of a project that had those Kenyans very much in mind. It is an initiative that has its roots at the start of modern American distance running and carries with it the character, ambitions, and flaws of the people - and the company - who pushed it forward.
Pre: The Soul of Nike
The story of modern U.S. distance running begins at the 1972 Berlin Olympics.
Munich’s Olympiastadion featured something unusual in the stands that year: Americans. They were easy to recognize against their mild-mannered European counterparts - rowdy baseball and football fans seeking to apply their enthusiasm to men running around a circle for 13 minutes. They all came wearing matching merchandise - it read Pre.
It was just as easy to pick the American runner out of the field. The runners that made up the men’s 5k were nearly indistinguishable, their long, lean bodies appropriate for the distance they were undertaking. But amongst them was Steve Prefontaine - a head shorter and twice the girth of his competition. Despite his strange looks and limited experience - Pre was only 21 at the Munich Olympics - he stayed with the front pack, his mullet and mustache bouncing along.
And then, with 600m to go, Pre made his move. He shot forward to first place, and for one glorious lap, Pre defiantly made his case against the running establishment, dueling with the leaders as the Americans in the crowd willed him forward. With 200m to go, he had given everything, forcing his stiffening legs and arms to pump as silver and gold drifted away. At 25m left, a Brit flew by Pre, who was running through quicksand. He finished in fourth at 13:28, shattered.
[The video below begins as Pre takes the lead before the final lap]
The American sporting consciousness does not typically save space for moral victories, but Pre’s ‘72 5k is an exception. The race made him an American icon - the country’s first distance running superstar. It also attracted the attention of a new running shoe company based in Beaverton, down the street from where Pre trained at the University of Oregon. In the ‘72 race, Phil Knight saw not only a great American runner, but a perfect representation of the first-or-nothing attitude at the heart of his company, Nike. Knight signed Pre as Nike’s first endorsed athlete. It was a match made in heaven. Pre was a showman - from his laps before and after the races, where he pumped his arms and hailed the crowds, to the brutal, uncompromising paces he set on the way to American records from 2000 to 10000 meters. Each race that Pre ran in his gold and green Nikes, the legend of him and the company grew more intertwined. Nike was the commercial embodiment of American running, and Pre was their avatar.
The perfect union of Pre and Nike and American running, however, ended in tragedy. In 1975, the same evening Pre ran the second fastest 5k in American history, his gold MGB convertible lost control and flipped, pinning him underneath. He died on the scene. His death weighed heavily on American running and even heavier on Nike and his friend Phil Knight.
Enter Salazar
As the ‘70s turned to the ‘80s and Nike evolved from a running company to a sportswear company, they found more of these uncompromising athletes that embodied their ethos. Michael Jordan shrugged and soared from the 80s into the 90s, followed by Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant carrying the torch into the new millennium. They looked nothing like Pre in appearance or action, but in spirit, the resemblance is unmistakable - they are all the same breed of competitive junkies, willing to mortgage health and happiness and everything in between for winning.
Nike found only one distance runner suitable to carry Pre’s mantle. In the late ‘70s, people began talking about a Cuban-born runner who ran himself to death and then back again. In the 1978 Falmouth Road Race, 20-year-old Alberto Salazar told teammate Bill Rodgers, one of the country's all-time great marathoners, that he’d set the pace for him and block the blustering winds coming off the Atlantic. Salazar did just that, and after ceding the lead to Rodgers and finishing 10th, collapsed at the finish line. His body temperature was 108, and unconscious, he was read his last rites - prematurely, it turned out. In the fall of that year, Salazar won the NCAA cross-country title at Oregon. Nike earmarked this modern-day Lazarus to become the new Pre; the face of Nike running and, therefore, American distance running.
The bet on Salazar paid off for Nike. He became the best distance runner in the United States - winning three straight New York Marathons from ‘81 to ‘83. His extreme win-or-die approach gave mainstream U.S. audiences the only must-watch American runner since Pre. ABC picked up the New York Marathon rights in ‘81 and continued broadcasting the race into the ‘90s. In 1982, Salazar ran his signature race at the Boston Marathon, the “Duel in the Sun” - a slog against Dick Beardsley that Salazar won at the line, collapsing into the arms of race officials and being carried to the medical tent to take seven liters of saline solution, his internal temperature at 88 degrees. Salazar had refused water through most of the race, insisting it would slow him down.
On the surface, Salazar’s willingness to die to win a race looked like Pre’s style, but while Pre’s exertions had a blue-collar, happy-go-lucky quality, Salazar’s had a more complicated, twisted feel. In his soul-crushing style were the memories of his father, who had fled Castro’s regime and would scream at Alberto, “A Salazar never quits!” during his school meets. This hardness from his father shaped the younger Salazar, along with his strong Catholic faith. Alberto recalled after his close brush with death in Falmouth that he “had learned, through the agency of lifelong prayer, that I wasn’t afraid of death. More important - at least to me in the midst of my obsession - it made me different from other runners.”
Salazar’s advantage was that he could push himself to places other athletes would not go, and even felt he had a divine mandate to do so. But after the heights of his early career, Salazar’s body began to break down. First came nagging injuries and then a rapid loss of fitness - which Salazar believes was the result of his endocrine system compromised by his many brushes with death. Despite his decline, Nike kept him on the payroll. He was a living legend and, most importantly, embodied the Nike ethos.
But alongside Salazar, the rest of American distance running receded in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Kenyans and Ethiopians began to dominate - first at the Olympics and then in U.S. races as well, overwhelming the Boston, New York, and Chicago marathons with a tidal wave of long, lean runners breaking course records with ease. The U.S., and the rest of the world, for that matter, had no response. Of the 24 Olympic distance finals (the 1500m to the marathon) between 1988 and 2008, there was at least one Kenyan in 19 of them. Over that same time, there were only two American distance medalists, neither of whom (the excellent Meb Keflezighi and Bernard Lagat) were American-born.
The U.S. fall from distance running grace was felt nowhere more than Nike. Many executives were runners and Pre fanatics, and Salazar, the last great American runner, was still shuffling the halls as a “marketing executive.” In late April 2001, Salazar sat next to Nike executive Tom Clarke to watch the finish of the Boston Marathon. A Korean was the surprise winner that year, beating out an Ecuadorian and a group of three Kenyans. Salazar and Clarke looked up from their sandwiches when they heard the announcers shouting for the top-finishing American, who took sixth place. Salazar, whose contempt for losing had finally reached its breaking point, turned to Clarke and told him he could coach the Americans to do better. As Salazar expanded on how he would combine his experience with the newest performance science and cutting-edge technology, Clarke furiously scribbled notes, then offered that Nike would foot the bill. Later that year, Nike announced the Oregon Project, and Salazar was named director and head coach. The mission statement: “To develop American distance runners who could win marathons and distance races.”
The Oregon Project
The early years of the Nike Oregon Project were best known for their splashy technological innovations. Salazar built his runners' hermetically sealed houses (which mimicked the high-altitude conditions in East Africa, which induce increased aerobic capacity by pulling oxygen out of the air). He pioneered the use of underwater treadmills and the Alter-G - both running instruments that allow athletes to run without the impact of their full body weight - so his runners could rack up 100-mile weeks without the usual risk of injury that came with it. He even flew phone -booth-sized cryotherapy chambers across the country so N.O.P. athletes could get three-minute sessions at -200F before races. These innovations all reflected the cutting edge in running science, insights gained from labs, and from watching the success of the East Africans.
In 2002, Salazar found a talent worthy of pairing with Nike’s investment. A friend of Salazar’s in Oregon called to tell him that one of his soccer players, a wiry high-school freshman named Galen Rupp, was knocking out 30-second 200s with ease. In their first meeting, Salazar saw the perfect vehicle to test the N.O.P’s thesis. Rupp had the physique and the natural gifts of an elite distance runner with none of the hangups of the more seasoned pros already working with the N.O.P. Salazar began training Rupp a few days a week between soccer practices. Rupp finished second place in the National Junior Olympics a few months later. That success was enough to convince both of them to go all in - Salazar committed to turning Rupp into the country’s best distance runner, and Rupp gave himself fully over to Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project.
At Nike, Rupp was nicknamed “The Project’s Project.” He was the clearest representation of Salazar’s vision while also serving as a kind of reckoning for his coach’s own failures as a runner. Salazar and the N.O.P. team carefully monitored Rupp’s health markers to ensure he was always optimally recovered and fueled to perform, ideas that Salazar would likely have dismissed as soft in his own running career. Salazar even drilled Rupp to use perfect running mechanics, a reflection of the new advances in biomechanics and an admission from Salazar that his own unorthodox technique, a gait that people called ugly and waddling, was what led to his injuries and early decline.
Yet, in another way, these innovations were also ways to enable Salazar to imbue his most fundamental trait into Rupp - an unmatched drive to win. All the N.O.P. athletes trained hard, but it was Rupp who ran the most crushing, daunting workouts of all - most famously his set of low-four-minute miles, moments after setting the American indoor record in the two-mile. Salazar also found common ground with Rupp in their strong Catholic faith, and it was no coincidence that Rupp began muttering prayers as he logged long miles at the front of his races. Rupp translated Salazar's ambitions into strong results, finishing his time at Oregon in 2009 as one of the all-time great college runners, with several U.S. junior and NCAA records.
[Galen Rupp running his famous set of mile repeats after setting the American indoor 2-mile record with coach Alberto Salazar.]
But the success of Rupp and the N.O.P. didn’t come without controversy. Just as he did in his running career, Salazar invited a level of darkness into the N.O.P. in how he pushed boundaries. Besides technology and attention to technique, Salazar saw the potential to catch up to the East Africans through the use of chemical supplements. Salazar would experiment with new chemicals or try out new dosing strategies to push his runners right to the legal limit of regulated ones. He became friends with Lance Armstrong, the infamous cyclist barred from competition for taking EPO, and the two would share theories and experiments about best practices to chemically improve performance.
USADA launched investigations into Salazar, arguing that in his experiments, he was violating the spirit of doping laws. But to Salazar, there was no spirit of the law, no ethical gray area - there were only the legal limits, and his duty as a coach was to bring his runners as close to them as possible to ensure they had every advantage in competition. This reputation of operating at the legal boundaries cast suspicion on the N.O.P. and put the project under increased scrutiny as it stretched into the 2010s.
But at the 2012 Olympics in London, the N.O.P. finally began to bear fruit. With a lap to go in the Olympic men's 10k, the lead group had separated from the pack. In it were a few of the usual suspects: two Eritreans, a Kenyan, and two Ethiopians - including all-time great Kenenisa Bekele. But also among them were two interlopers, Galen Rupp and his British N.O.P. teammate Mo Farah. Farah was leading the pack, and with 100m to go, pulled away to capture Britain’s first ever 10k gold. But behind Farah’s triumph was more history: in the final 100m, Rupp outkicked Bekele to take silver, putting an American on the podium for the 10k for the first time since 1964. Galen Rupp, the Project’s Project, had finally realized the dreams for U.S. distance that Salzar and Clarke had shared in the Nike cafeteria all those years ago.
[Salazar and Rupp’s 1-2 finish in the Olympic 10K (video begins in the final stretch)]
A New Era of American Success
That 2012 10K broke the seal for American distance running. Three days later, Leonel Manzano, another N.O.P. athlete, won silver for the first U.S. medal in the 1500m since Jim Ryun in 1968.
In the years that followed, the N.O.P. asserted itself as the best team in the world. In 2016, N.O.P. athletes swept distance gold medals from the 1500m (Matt Centrowitz) to the 10k (Mo Farah). Rupp won bronze at the 2016 Olympics in his second-ever marathon after setting a laundry list of American records from 2012 to 2014. He followed that up in 2017 by becoming the first American-born man to win the Chicago Marathon since 1982.
But at the 2019 world championships in Doha, with the N.O.P. at the pinnacle of world track, USADA handed Salazar a four-year doping ban. The charges were for trafficking and administering regulated substances like testosterone and L-carnitine to non-athletes, including his assistants and sons, in what Salazar claimed were experiments to find optimal dosing techniques. The arbitrators in the case would rule that Salazar had shown exceptional care in trying not to violate doping regulations but that the experiments violated rules on technical grounds. None of Salazar’s athletes would ever test positive or receive a ban or suspension from USADA. With athletes attempting to distance themselves from the program’s doping allegations, Nike shut the N.O.P. down after the world championships.
However, the controversies for Salazar and the N.O.P. did not stop there. On the heels of his suspension, former N.O.P. athlete Mary Cain published an explosive New York Times op-ed accusing Salazar and the N.O.P. of emotional abuse. The allegations were centered around the coaching staff pressuring the N.O.P.’s athletes to limit eating to maintain an optimal racing weight. Cain asserted that the environment cultivated by Salazar led to depression and an eating disorder, a claim supported by fellow female runners and assistants at the N.O.P., including Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley. Cain filed a $20M suit against Nike and Salazar, which the parties later settled.
Even with Salazar unable to coach and now the target of a social justice rallying cry in the aftermath of the Cain allegations, Nike continued to stand by him. They maintained his name on a prominent building on campus and footed millions in legal fees. In 2021, however, the U.S. watchdog SafeSport banned Salazar from coaching U.S. athletes for life for emotional and sexual abuses. In 2023, former athlete Kara Goucher revealed in her memoir that she was the victim in the SafeSport case. Following the SafeSport ban and on-campus protests from employees, Nike cut ties with Salazar. Salazar denied Goucher’s allegations but lost a consequent appeal and remains barred from coaching U.S. athletes indefinitely.
The N.O.P’s Legacy
Even after Nike disbanded the N.O.P., the program remained the biggest influence on U.S. distance running. The N.O.P.’s ghost is easiest to see in the proliferation of the elite, corporate-sponsored track club, like its sister programs: the Oregon Track Club (OTC) as well as the Bowerman Track Club (BTC). OTC and BTC cultivated elite athletes like the Oregon Project, albeit in a more traditional, less Salazarian fashion. Over time, however, both programs began taking cues from the innovations of their more cutting-edge, albeit controversial, sibling. In 2007, Salazar’s assistant and chosen heir to the N.O.P., Jerry Schumacher, left the club to take the top job at BTC, where he cemented them as the second-finest running club in the U.S.
The corporate running club model spread beyond Nike as well. Brooks Beasts in Seattle started in 2014, followed by Hoka’s Northern Arizona Elite in 2015. In 2020, On Athletics Club was founded, and Dathan Ritzenhein, a former N.O.P. athlete, was hired as head coach. As Ken Goe, a reporter from The Oregonian, remarked, the resources these clubs were now investing directly resulted from the N.O.P.’s prior outlays: “At least Nike has cared and wants the sport to succeed,” said Goe, “Nike not only invests in athletes, but also forces the other clubs that want to compete with Nike to invest.1
This increased investment in U.S. track from across the industry has grown the base of U.S. running. As the number of high-level track clubs grew in the wake of the Oregon project, the number of elite runners those clubs produced grew along with it. The effect was a rising tide of U.S. distance, with more top athletes pushing each other to faster times. It was also out of this explosion in the number of capable U.S. runners that the outliers began to emerge, athletes like Rupp, Hocker, Fisher, and Centrowitz, who were capable of setting world records and winning the big races - the vision of the N.O.P. when it began all those years ago.
Once the N.O.P. borrowed their training methods and simulated their altitude, the East Africans’ numerical superiority was their last real advantage - the one thing Salazar’s program couldn't produce on its own. Salazar himself said as much in a 2010 interview with Range author David Epstein, just before the N.O.P. began to take off.
“[O]verall it’s a numbers game. We’ve just got to get a lot of these groups going because we’re going against hundreds of athletes in camps [in East Africa] that are training unbelievably hard and at high volumes. We don’t have those numbers… You can be a sub-13 5k runner (4:11 mile pace) and you’re in groups where you may be the 10th guy in the pack. It would be like if you sent Dathan [Ritzenhein, former 5k U.S. record holder] to run at Randall’s Island at four in the afternoon and … 30 guys showed up and ran the exact same workout as him. It’s like that over there.”
It is now like that over here as well. But while Salazar will live out this new golden era of U.S. distance running in exile, his corporate partner remains at the table, ready to finally reap the rewards of its near half-century of investment.
The Nike Angle
To this day, Nike takes its brightest new hires a couple of miles off-campus to a winding, wooded section of Skyline Boulevard. A shrine littered with Nike shoes and yellow singlets lies at the base of the boulder that Steve Prefrontaine’s gold MGB struck almost 50 years before. Even today, Pre remains at the heart of Nike.
Alberto Salazar’s motivations through the Nike Oregon Project were simple. With the East Africans in front of him and the demons of his running career on his heels, his interests and the prospects of U.S. distance running were clearly aligned. Less obvious, however, is why Nike, which also invests heavily in outfitting those very East Africans, from Bekele to Eliud Kipchoge, was so willing to throw tens of millions of dollars into American running.
The financial incentives aren’t immediately clear. Even as the U.S. is on the brink of overtaking East Africa in training the world’s best distance runners, those runners to date have produced little commercial value to Nike. Galen Rupp, who surpassed even many of Salazar’s achievements, never quite had the charisma or ran with the showmanship to capture the American audience. Cole Hocker and Grant Fisher, Nike’s two U.S. men’s distance medalists from Paris, haven’t found their way onto commercials or billboards since the Olympics and remain relatively anonymous amongst the general public. The reputation of elite U.S. distance runners remains as it has been post-Salazar: soft-spoken, humble athletes who also happen to be very fast - not the type with much of a brand or who are likely to convince you to buy a new pair of sneakers.
But each dollar that Nike spends to raise the profile of American running is also one to further a goal much more central to the company: finding the next Steve Prefontaine. In the way that Nike had Michael Jordan to define basketball and Tiger Woods to define golf, the company needs an American distance hero to bring distance running back into our public discourse and let the sport at the core of Nike return to the core of America.
It’s worth it for Nike to pour money into fostering the entire infrastructure of American distance running because they believe that the next running superstar will emerge from it. Nike is betting on an outlier - a one-in-a-billion athlete who changes how our society views the sport, how consumers spend on that sport, and in turn, how that revenue flows to Nike.
Distance running isn’t the only place that Nike has run this playbook. Another long-marginalized sport in the U.S. was women’s basketball. In 2022, with the WNBA struggling financially in the wake of COVID-19 and slow growth, Nike stepped in with a massive $25M investment, the largest contribution of the company's partnership with the league that dates back to its 1996 founding. The reason Nike cited for the investment was to “grow the visibility of women’s basketball.” Grow it they did; but perhaps more importantly for the company, two years later Nike secured the endorsement of Caitlin Clark. Clark is one of the most marketable athletes in the history of sports, who has transformed the public perception, and the financials, of the entire sport.
Nike’s bet on American distance running is similar, albeit more personal. There is a mantle in Beaverton that has sat empty since the decline of U.S. running in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and Nike is investing heavily to ensure that an American runner will soon be ready to fill it. While the company has adapted and evolved over the years, the core of Nike remains its great American athletes. That is because Nike has never just been in the sports apparel business. You aren’t buying their shoes or clothes for better performance or better prices - you’re buying red-blooded, American, sporting exceptionalism. To sell that, however, Nike needs exceptional athletes that not only win, but do it in style. They need Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant dropping fifty while shrugging and smack-talking. They need Tiger Woods fist-pumping in his Sunday red polo. They need Caitlin Clark hoisting up threes from the parking lot and selling out arena after arena. And what Nike has built in U.S. track and accelerated through the Oregon Project is the pipeline for that singular athlete to emerge - capturing the American consumer with medals around their neck and swooshes everywhere else.
Edited Excellently by Greta Gruber
This quote comes from “Nike’s Big Bet,” a documentary covering Salazar, Nike, and their impact on world distance running. It’s a fascinating watch, with interviews featuring former N.O.P’s athletes, as well as Malcom Gladwell, a running fanatic and one-time Salazar supporter. The timing of the documentary provides an interesting perspective, as it was filmed and released after the doping suspension and allegations from Mary Cain against Salazar, but prior to the sexual abuse allegations brought by Kara Goucher which lost Salazar his support from Nike and his former colleagues in the running community.