In light of the Salazar revelations from both USADA and Cain, largely centering around Salazar acting as an authority in areas he has no qualifications (medical, nutrition, psychology, etc), I’m reminded by a case that hits close to my own area:

His obsession with biomechanics

Specifically, his fixation on “fixing” @djritzenhein’s mechanics. Most biomechanics researchers recognize the highly individualized nature of mechanics, even (nay, especially) at the elite level.

Salazar was bent on making Ritz more like Bekele and Gebrselassie

This ignores (a) the scores of other athletes who achieved success with wildly different mechanical patterns and (b) the notion that Ritz’s mechanics had been relatively self-optimized to his own musculoskeletal structure.

That’s not to say there weren’t things to be improved, but that the optimal path forward was one that was truest to his own machinery, and wasn’t mutually exclusive from world class success.

Instead Salazar pushed his own myopic “understanding” of optimal form on Ritz.

This is a similar behavioral pattern to the weight issue: he has an “ideal” form in his mind, *doesn’t know what he doesn’t know* about the nuance and complexity of the subject, and then imposes the pursuit of that “ideal” on the athlete

“Dathan can’t be a heel striker and expect to run as fast as the best forefoot runners” Salazar said.

This is both false and ignorant, it and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of distance running mechanics. Especially egregious with Ritz’s status as an elite marathoner

It saddens me, as attempts to overhaul a runner’s form and impose some misguided “ideal” on that runner is totally reckless by a coach, and is similarly injurious and detrimental to a career as his other “interventions”.

Was Ritz’s career scarred forever by these years?

That saga was covered in this piece from The New Yorker.

“When I came to Alberto, I thought I was done being hurt,” Ritzenhein said. “But this is the longest cycle of injuries that I’ve ever had: probably by double, or even triple.”” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/08/the-perfect-stride