'I Won't Be Silent'

Olympian Kara Goucher was thrilled to join Nike's elite running team. But soon she was trapped in a web of emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of her famous coach and had to fight to expose the truth

- K.C. BAKER

When long-distance runner Kara Goucher found herself at Nike's famed campus in Beaverton, Ore., at the age of 26, she was thrilled to embrace a dream come true. Kara and her husband, Adam Goucher, then 29, both top runners with Olympic aspirations, had been invited to join the Nike Oregon Project, an exclusive, well-funded team led by celebrated marathon champion Alberto Salazar. "There wasn't another program like that in the world at the time," Kara says. "We would be fools to turn down this opportunity."

A lightning-quick runner who would go on to become a two-time Olympian and the face of Nike, Kara had no idea that her seven years with the Oregon Project would elevate her career to soaring new heights and drag her into one of the darkest chapters of her life. In her explosive new memoir The Longest Race, Kara, now 44, opens up about how she and Adam helped expose Salazar-the once-beloved coach they regarded as a father figure-for anti-doping violations, including trafficking testosterone.

Salazar, 64, was banned from the sport for life in 2021 by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit formed in 2017 to investigate abuse of athletes. In an appeal hearing later that year, the ruling was that it was "more likely than not" that Salazar sexually abused one of his runners during a massage. (Salazar has denied doping and abuse claims, both in legal proceedings and in a lengthy blog post. "I consider any kind of sexual misconduct toward another person to be personally repugnant and to go against everything I believe," he wrote in 2022.)

For the first time, Kara is revealing publicly that she was the unnamed victim of the sexual abuse that led to Salazar's ban. Finding the courage to break free of his toxic grip and expose the truth about his take-no-prisoners coaching methods that she says Nike supported "was hard," says Kara. "But keeping these secrets was like a cancer. I won't be silent. I needed to heal."