Can Galen Rupp Outrun the Shadow of a Disgraced Former Coach?

Weldon Johnson, once one of the top distance runners in the country and a co-founder of Letsrun.com, the influential website that serves as something of a superego for American running, said associations will breed distrust.

“I think we should evaluate his career like everyone else but with more skepticism since one athlete is tied more closely to Alberto than anyone else and that is Galen Rupp,” Johnson said last week. “Based on performance, he’s the greatest American male long distance runner of his generation, since Steve Prefontaine probably.”

Rupp, whose agent, Ricky Simms, declined to make him available for this article, has never failed a drug test. There have been many of them, both the regularly scheduled ones at races and random, out-of-competition tests that all international athletes must submit to at random.

Salazar, a former world-record holder in the men’s marathon, a three-time champion in New York and the Boston champion in 1982, discovered Rupp while watching him play high school soccer in Portland, Ore., believing that his mix of speed and endurance would translate perfectly into elite distance running.

In 2001, Salazar founded the Nike Oregon Project, a distance running team singularly focused on developing athletes — especially Rupp after his University of Oregon career and, for a brief period, Mo Farah of Britain — who could beat the dominant East Africans in the biggest meets.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/sports/galen-rupp-salazar-world-championships.html