The following editorial contains themes of disordered eating and suicide.
At only 17 years old, distance runner Mary Cain had the track-and-field world in the palm of her hand.
A teen prodigy, Cain set over a dozen national high school records in the 800m, 1000m, 1500m, 1600m, 3200m, 5000m, and more, quickly establishing herself as one of the most coveted blue-chip recruits in the nation. She was irresistible in the eyes of America’s most prestigious track and field programs. In 2013, however, Cain was convinced to make an unorthodox decision to bypass the traditional college track system and instead sign up for the Nike Oregon Project, an elite distance running team founded in 2001 by Alberto Salazar, which sought to breed the most dominant American long-distance runners that the national stage had ever seen.
For four years, Cain endured a deeply toxic training environment shaped by control and harmful misinformation that was perpetuated by Salazar and his all-male training staff. She was repeatedly told that to become faster, she needed to lose drastic and unhealthy amounts of weight, pushing her toward dangerous levels of thinness. Under his direction, she was pressured into taking diuretics and birth control pills as methods of weight control, further endangering her health. Unsurprisingly, during this period, her performance declined, and she recorded some of the slowest times of her career. All the while, the media glamorized her experience with Nike Oregon Project, claiming she was receiving the best instruction one could ask for in the track and field world.
Despite operating as part of a high-profile Nike program, Salazar’s staff consisted largely of personal associates rather than qualified professionals, so when Cain sought guidance or support, she found none; every staff member ultimately deferred to Salazar’s authority. After years of relentless pressure and deteriorating physical health, Cain spiraled into self-harm tendencies and began to view suicidal ideation as her only form of escape from an environment she felt trapped in. Even after expressing the severity of her mental struggles to Salazar and her coaches, she was met with a complete lack of compassion and was instead told to “toughen up.” Her full New York Times op-ed, “I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike,” provides a firsthand account of these experiences and is available online.
Cain’s story is not an isolated case; it is a magnified reflection of what many young female athletes experience under predominantly male coaching structures that fail to prioritize their physical safety, mental health, or humanity. This disconnect is largely rooted in the fact that many male coaches have no real framework for understanding what it means to train a young woman rather than a young man. Female athletes are not biologically the same as male athletes. Because female bodies respond differently to load, nutrition, and stress, and female experiences with pressure and performance are deeply gendered, training women cannot be treated as simply a scaled‑down version of training men. Likewise, a singular female athlete cannot be expected to operate within the same parameters as another female athlete. The perpetration of this rhetoric is what forces female athletes to grapple with the expectation to be both strong and small, performing at an elite level while conforming to narrow, harmful standards of training and physical or emotional burden.
This is not to insinuate that female athletes cannot “handle” the demands of a male coach. The argument is not that male coaches are too harsh and must be replaced totally in women’s sport, but that the current coaching landscape is too narrow. Female athletes deserve to be coached by people who can see them as both athletes and women—people who understand the unique pressures faced by female athletes, whether that comes from lived experience as a woman or from deep, intentional education in female‑specific training. Equal treatment does not mean identical treatment; it means being coached in a way that reflects the individual.
If female athletes continue to train under staff structures that ignore or misunderstand these realities, champions will not be produced, but rather broken bodies and shattered psyches. Female athletes deserve environments where they are seen, heard, and trained as who they are, and that means hiring more female coaches to create a culture where pain and humanity are not treated as secondary to performance. Only then can patterns—Cain’s and countless others’—stop being repeated, and a future where young women can compete without being destroyed by the systems meant to develop them will be built.
