Win at All Costs
Inside Nike Running and Its Culture of Deception
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4.4 • 22 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"After years of rumors and speculation, Matt Hart sets out to peel back the layers of secrecy that protected the most powerful coach in running. What he finds will leave you indignant—and wondering whether anything in the high-stakes world of Olympic sport has truly changed." —Alex Hutchinson, New York Times bestselling author of Endure
Game of Shadows meets Shoe Dog in this explosive behind-the-scenes look that reveals for the first time the unsettling details of Nike's secret running program—the Nike Oregon Project.
In May 2017, journalist Matt Hart received a USB drive containing a single file—a 4.7-megabyte PDF named “Tic Toc, Tic Toc. . . .” He quickly realized he was in possession of a stolen report prepared a year earlier by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) for the Texas Medical Board, part of an investigation into legendary running coach Alberto Salazar, a Houston-based endocrinologist named Dr. Jeffrey Brown, and cheating by Nike-sponsored runners, including some of the world’s best athletes. The information Hart received was part of an unfolding story of deception which began when Steve Magness, an assistant to Salazar, broke the omertà—the Mafia-like code of silence about performance-enhancing drugs among those involved—and alerted USADA. He was soon followed by Olympians Adam and Kara Goucher who risked their careers to become whistleblowers on their former Nike running family in Beaverton, Oregon.
Combining sports drama and business exposé, Win at All Costs tells the full story of Nike’s running program, uncovering a corporate win-at-all-costs culture.
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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 expos wows.
