Alberto Salazar

Alberto Salazar (born August 7, 1958) is an American former track coach and long-distance runner.

Born in Cuba, Salazar immigrated to the United States as a child with his family, living in Connecticut and then in Wayland, Massachusetts, where Salazar competed in track and field in high school.

The younger Salazar was an outstanding high school runner who was state cross country champion in 1975.

He trained with the well-known Greater Boston Track Club (whose members included the likes of Bill Rodgers, Randy Thomas, and Greg Meyer), where he was given the nickname of "the rookie".

From Massachusetts, he went to the University of Oregon where he won numerous All-American honors, was a member of the 1977 NCAA cross country championship team, and won the individual NCAA cross country championship in 1978.

Salazar won the 1978 NCAA national cross country championship in cold, snowy conditions, handing Track & Field News Athlete of the Year Henry Rono one of his few losses of the year.

At the 1978 Falmouth Road Race after fading to 10th place, he collapsed at the finish with a temperature of 107 degrees Fahrenheit (41.7 °C) and was read his last rites prematurely.

He finished 2nd to Rono in a memorable contest at the 1979 NCAA national cross country championships at Lehigh University, in which Rono (28:19) and Salazar (28:28) ran the 3rd and 5th fastest 10,000-meter cross country times in NCAA championship history.

Neither time has been matched in over three decades of NCAA cross country competition since then.

Salazar was also the U.S. national cross country champion in 1979.

Salazar won the New York City Marathon three times in the early 1980s, and won the 1982 Boston Marathon in a race known as the "Duel in the Sun".

After that, he finished third in the Olympic Trials 10,000-meter race in 28:10.42 to make the 1980 Olympic team (which didn't compete in the Olympics in Moscow due to the U.S. boycott) and received one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the spurned athletes.

From 1980 through 1982, Salazar won three consecutive New York City Marathons.

His first-ever marathon was the 1980 race, which he won in 2:09:41, at the time the fastest American debut and the second-fastest time recorded by a U.S. runner (behind Bill Rodgers' 2:09:27 at Boston in 1979).

He was on that week's cover of Sports Illustrated after the victory.

At the 1981 Millrose Games in New York, he set an American indoor 5,000 meter record with a time of 13:21.2, finishing second behind Suleiman Nyambui, who broke the indoor world record with a 13:20.3.

In 1981, Salazar set an apparent world record at the New York City Marathon of 2:08:13, surpassing the 12-year-old mark of 2:08:33 set by Australian Derek Clayton in 1969 in Antwerp, Belgium.

However, the course was found on re-measurement to be about 148 meters short of the 42.195 kilometers (26 miles, 385 yards) distance.

This is equivalent to about 27 seconds.

He set American track records for 5,000 m and 10,000 m in 1982.

Salazar was later the head coach of the Nike Oregon Project.

In 1982 he won his first and only Boston Marathon after the memorable head-to-head with Dick Beardsley.

Salazar won the race in an exciting sprint finish and collapsed at the end before being taken to an emergency room and given six liters of saline solution intravenously because he did not drink fluids during the race.

Salazar ended the year ranked #1 in the world in the marathon by Track & Field News magazine for his wins in Boston and New York, #1 in their North American Road Rankings for his American 10K road record win of 28:04 at the Orange Bowl 10K and his course record of 31:53 at the highly competitive Falmouth 7.1 mi road race (his second win and course record there), #8 in the world (and #1 American with an AR of 13:11.93) in the 5,000 meters, and #2 in the world in the 10,000 meters, with three second-place finishes at Eugene (27:30.0), at Oslo in an American Record of 27:25.61, and at Paris (27:29.06).

Salazar enjoyed success in cross country competition, earning several All-American honors in collegiate and post-collegiate national championships.

He fared well at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships, finishing second in 1982 and fourth in 1983.

His silver medal in 1982 marks the last time an American male reached the podium in World Cross Country.

In addition to a fourth-place finish (only one second behind the top three placers) at the 1983 world cross country championships, Salazar twice broke the American 10 km road record in 1983 with efforts of 28:02 and 28:01 at the Americas 10 km and Continental Homes 10 km respectively.

He finished as the top ranker in Track & Field News magazine's North American Road Rankings for 1983.

He was also the 10,000-meter national track champion in 1983, pulling away from Craig Virgin in the last straightaway at the U.S. championships in Indiana in June to win his second such title (the first coming in 1981).

However, he finished last in the 10,000 meters at the World Track & Field Championships while suffering from bronchitis and was beaten for the first time in the marathon, finishing fifth at the Rotterdam marathon in April (2:10:08) and then fifth again at Fukuoka in December (2:09:21).

He won the IAAF Coaching Achievement Award in 2013.

In 2015, Salazar was named in a joint BBC Panorama and ProPublica investigation into doping allegations.

In 2019, Salazar was banned for four years from athletics for doping offenses involving athletes he coached.

The Nike Oregon Project was shut down in the wake of the controversy.

In January 2020, the United States Center for SafeSport placed Salazar on its temporarily banned list while it investigated allegations against him involving sexual and emotional misconduct.

SafeSport permanently banned him a year and a half later, in July 2021, after it found that he had committed four violations involving emotional and sexual misconduct.

In December 2021, Salazar appealed the ban in arbitration but lost, making him permanently ineligible for any activity held by the USOPC or any sport's USOPC-recognized National Governing Body.

Born in Cuba, Salazar grew up in Wayland, Massachusetts.

His father Jose was a close friend of Fidel Castro and a revolutionary, who then became an opponent of the totalitarian communist regime and member of the anti-Castro movement.