To the average runner, the acronym USATF—short for USA Track & Field—doesn’t mean much. The organization was chartered in 1979 (under the name The Athletics Congress) by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) to govern the whole of American “Athletics,” meaning track and field, long-distance running, cross-country, road races, and race walking—and within those disciplines, participants ranging from Olympic athletes to kids. Today, its stated mission is to “[drive] competitive excellence and popular engagement in our sport.”
Structurally, USATF is something of a representative democracy. At the top is a 15-member volunteer board of directors, a volunteer president, and a board-appointed CEO who leads a small, paid national staff in Indianapolis. The base of the pyramid, USATF’s constituency, is a legion of more than 126,000 registered members, nearly two-thirds of whom are kids (USATF’s youth initiatives are particularly robust). Others include athletes of all skill levels, race officials, and coaches. An individual—any adult, really—can register as a member for $30 a year (which comes with discounts on merchandise, sport-accident insurance, and other miscellaneous perks). Local running clubs, such as New York Road Runners, also have memberships. USATF counts 3,475 such clubs, which are grouped into 57 regional associations, such as USATF Oregon and USATF New England. Organizations such as the NCAA and Running USA are affiliate members, as well. All of these myriad constituencies choose officers, members, and delegates—about 1,000 total—who represent their interests at USATF’s Annual Meeting. These are the folks who most directly fuel the volunteer engine of USATF, who, through various committees, organize USATF championship meets, make the rules, and propose other recommendations to the board.
No doubt, the organization is a behemoth. Currently at the reins of the volunteer pyramid is Stephanie Hightower, who was first elected president in 2008, then re-elected in 2012. (By day, Hightower is the president and CEO of the Columbus Urban League in Ohio.) Her counterpart, based in the national office, is CEO Max Siegel, who was hired in May 2012. Siegel is, on paper, accountable to the president and board. As volunteer leaders, the president and board are, in turn, accountable to the membership.
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Well, you should care first and foremost because USATF has an important role in events you enjoy, creating rules and sanctioning races. Many of those who help stage USATF-sanctioned road races are, in fact, volunteers who need and deserve our support.
Moreover, the organization is responsible for developing and supporting our elite athletes, which includes the important tasks of enforcing competition rules and adjudicating related disputes and, every four years, putting together an Olympic team. “USATF is the governing body for road racing, [they select the] marathon teams,” says Lauren Fleshman, a top 5000-meter runner and frequent commentator on the actions of the organization (as well as a Runner’s World contributor). “They are in charge of certifying just about every major and minor racecourse you’ve run. They make the rules. They make the decisions that make our sport cool or not, accessible or not, a viable profession or not.”
But for years now, USATF has been hammered by increasing, and increasingly harsh, criticism. Last year was especially bad. In episode after episode, its leaders bungled the handling of race rulings and ignored the wishes of its members, especially its top athletes. The relationship with some of these athletes has soured to the point that Olympian 800-meter runner Nick Symmonds says, “There are days I contemplate boycotting USATF meets for the rest of my career.”
David Greifinger, USATF’s counsel to the board from 1996 to 2008 and still an active committee member, blames the disconnect on the volunteer leadership. “The disease is a board of directors that will not listen to its membership and thinks it knows better.”
Siegel’s predecessor as CEO, Doug Logan, who was bounced out after two years on the job, suggests that the flaws begin with the organization’s power structure. “There is a schizophrenic architecture to USATF that is meant to serve both a volunteer membership and a professional sport,” he says. “That causes a lot of wacky behavior.”
The fact is, the sport USATF is tasked to govern has evolved dramatically since 1979, particularly at the elite end, and the organization hasn’t adapted at the same rate. To borrow a phrase meant to denigrate certain kinds of athletes: USATF is big but slow. Back at its inception, USATF didn’t have a professional sport to manage on top of everything else, but now it does. Today, the revenue USATF brings in from sponsorships fuels its very existence. The paradox, and the root of USATF’s “schizophrenia,” is that the elite and professional sport still only represents a sliver of the constituency USATF was chartered to serve. (Which athletes qualify as “elite” and which are “professionals”—and thereby are arguably entitled to more financial support—is a hotly debated topic in its own right.) It’s not a stretch to say that no other governing body in America is tasked to manage a pro sport the way USATF has been, and likewise, no other pro sport is so awkwardly hitched to this kind of bureaucracy. The CEO’s job—bringing in sponsorships, expanding the business of USATF—has become more important than it was perhaps ever intended to be. In recent years, it follows that the president and board have often behaved in lockstep with the CEO in a way that has often alienated the membership. The result: a contentious power struggle between USATF’s leaders and volunteer base.
So what should USATF be doing, and how did things get so sideways? Has the immense criticism levied against its leaders been fair? For answers, a look at the past year is in order.
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USATF leaders and their constituents did not ring in the year on a harmonious note. The previous month had seen a contentious annual meeting, in particular a squabble about where the 2016 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials should be held. A volunteer committee of five distance-running leaders wanted it back in Houston, where the 2012 Marathon Trials took place, in part because that city offered more prize money. CEO Max Siegel wanted it held in Los Angeles for the increased exposure and sponsorship opportunities he believed that city offered.
The dispute revolved around who had the authority to make the call. The rule on the books gave it to the CEO, but at the meeting, the membership voted to change the wording that explicitly did so. The meeting ended without a decision, but afterward USATF spokeswoman Jill Geer told Buty nike Vegas x Undefeated Air Max 90 Biel that a USOC rule made it the CEO’s decision no matter what the membership wanted, and on January 29, USATF announced that the Trials were going to L.A.
Rank and file USATF distance runners were outraged, of course—and not for the first time. The internal power struggle between the USATF’s vast membership base and its top leaders, the CEO and the board, dates to 2008, when the USOC threatened to decertify the organization if it didn’t drastically shape up. At the time, ironically, it was the organization’s zealous effort to satisfy its myriad constituencies that had bloated the board to 32 members, hampering its ability to accomplish anything of value.
Bill Roe, a revered leader in the distance-running community and founder of Seattle’s Club Northwest, has seen the evolution of the organization from its inception. He was on the first board of directors, and rose through the ranks to become Hightower’s predecessor as president, reigning from 2000 to 2008. In one of his final efforts as president, Roe helped author the sweeping governance changes that empower Siegel today. “The USOC wanted the leadership staff to have more responsibility,” he says, “so when Max made the final decision on the Marathon Trials for 2016, he was acting within the scope of the model we approved.”
In 2008, Roe and the board hired an outsider as CEO, former Major League Soccer commissioner Doug Logan, who oversaw the slashing of the board to 15 members as well as dramatic bylaw revisions. He also established USATF’s Project 30, setting a 2012 Olympic medals goal of 30, after Team USA earned 23 in track and field in 2008, and set about achieving it by taking the responsibility of elite athlete development away from volunteer committees and vesting it in paid professionals. Logan’s brash style wore thin, and the board fired him in 2010. The model from the USOC mandate to centralize power still existed, however, when Siegel took over in 2012.
A former sports and entertainment attorney and exec, and—notably—USATF board member since 2009, Siegel wasn’t the board’s first choice to replace Logan. That was University of Oregon track-and-field director Vin Lananna, who turned down the job. Several months after Lananna passed, Siegel resigned from the board to contract with USATF as a marketing consultant. Not even six months later, the board hired him as CEO. Some observers decried the move as an inside job. But the board cited his entertainment and sports marketing credentials as compelling enough for them to move forward despite the backlash. “We needed new revenues, we needed to develop new relationships, we needed to rebuild the brand both domestically and internationally,” Hightower said. “Hiring Max was one of our first accomplishments in being able to do that.”
Thus, when Siegel and the board thought Los Angeles presented the best opportunity to build the brand long-term, too bad if some members got their feelings hurt. Or, as Hightower put it to me: “Touchy, feel-good stuff doesn’t work in the world anymore. This was about economics. Max had to weigh, from a commercial standpoint, what was the best venue. That’s the bottom line.”
February: Reversing the Call
USA Indoor Track & Field Championships, Albuquerque, New Mexico: Gabe Grunewald and Andrew Bumbalough are both dubiously disqualified for illegal contact in their respective 3000-meter finals—and both DQs come after protests are filed by nike Vegas Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar. In Grunewald’s case, she had won her race and the national title when an umpire reported that she had illegally bumped Salazar’s athlete, Jordan Hasay. After a video review, the referee ruled that she had not. Salazar argued forcefully with officials and filed an appeal, but further review failed to change the ruling. However, at some point a technician had officials view the incident on a laptop—the initial review was of a projection onto a bed sheet—and this time, Grunewald was disqualified. Salazar could be seen saying something to officials after sticking his head into the area where they were reviewing the clearer video. That, paired with his earlier protests, led some observers to suspect that he was exerting unfair influence as an employee of Nike, USATF’s most powerful commercial partner.
Bumbalough’s case was one of mistaken identity. An umpire observed an athlete, who turned out to be Ryan Hill, bumping Salazar’s athlete, Galen Rupp, and reported that it was Bumbalough. Salazar again filed a protest, and a referee, assuming the umpire’s identification of Bumbalough was correct even after a video review, disqualified him. (Bumbalough, it should be noted, is also a Nike-sponsored athlete, though he has a different coach.)
The public backlash was swift, and some runners in the women’s 1500 the next day exited the track after the event in silent, hand-in-hand protest of the USATF’s decision to DQ Grunewald. The nascent nike Vegas air force 1 low bg outside the lines, formed in 2010 to function as a collective voice for professional track-and-field athletes, petitioned the USATF for an explanation, and a few athletes even discussed boycotting outdoor nationals in June.
Two days after Grunewald’s disqualification, Siegel spoke with all parties, Salazar withdrew his appeal, and Grunewald was reinstated as champion. Bumbalough, who finished eighth and never filed an appeal, was left in limbo. About a month after the meet, Hightower convened a working group to examine the incidents, but its report wasn’t released until July. Their findings: Bumbalough was wronged, Salazar was assertive but did not receive deference, and the rules related to disqualifications and appeals needed revisions.
“I kept thinking, this is ‘coin flip’ all over again,” Nick Symmonds told me several weeks after USATF released its report, echoing the sentiments of many athletes. “In Andy Bumbalough’s situation, it took three months to even acknowledge that a mistake was made. It’s just so disrespectful.”
The “coin flip” incident happened at the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials, and was the first major crisis Siegel had to confront as USATF CEO. In the women’s 100-meter final, there was a dead heat for third place, the final spot on the Olympic team. USATF’s dense handbook didn’t have a single rule for how to handle a dead heat, a fact laced with irony since the last time a Trials tie occurred was the four-way deadlock in the women’s 100 hurdles in 1984—when the odd woman out was none other than future USATF president Stephanie Hightower. (She was ruled in fourth place after photo review.)
At the 2012 Trials, Siegel deferred to a large group of experts, who took more than 24 hours to come up with a solution: the runners could choose between a run-off and a coin flip. The solution was rendered moot when one of the athletes, Jeneba Tarmoh, conceded the spot in frustration. Siegel received the brunt of the ensuing criticism. In an interview at USATF headquarters in Indianapolis in August, he gave me his reasons for not taking control in that instance.
“We had the USOC, the IAAF, the athlete representation, legal counsel, high performance, the president of the organization—we had every group sitting around to come up with the decision,” he said. “Why should I speak about something because I’m the CEO?”
In the wake of Albuquerque, USATF made an effort in press releases and interviews given by spokesperson Geer, as she told me, “to delineate the lines of responsibility and accountability and authority for these issues, which is that Field of Play decisions are under the jurisdiction of our volunteer committees.”
Albuquerque had the effect of discrediting the whole body of passionate USATF volunteers who help put on dozens of championship meets of all kinds that usually go off without a hitch. Like the popular USATF Junior Olympics series of meets, or the USATF National Club Cross-Country Championships held in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in December, which was generally well-regarded by participants and fans.
Kim Keenan-Kirkpatrick, chair of USATF’s women’s long-distance running committee and, by day, senior associate athletic director at Seton Hall University, attended the Bethlehem meet (at which Runner’s World was a sponsor), and she laments that the successful volunteer-run events get overshadowed by larger controversies. “I’ve been involved for over 20 years with USATF,” she says, “and it’s disappointing that the first time people hear something and they don’t understand the decision, they say, ‘Oh, USATF is terrible, it’s dysfunctional.’ Part of it is making sure the organization communicates well. Constituents want to know how you got from Point A to Point B. USATF can improve in this area.”
Yes, Siegel made the phone calls and got Grunewald’s DQ sorted out, but in the immediate aftermath of Albuquerque, USATF’s leaders were silent. That creates the kind of vacuum that gets filled with anger, anger that leads to rumors—like those about Nike’s influence on the proceedings. But Siegel has operated since day one with a clear notion of what his mandate is, and he does not believe that includes being a public figure. He calls Hightower USATF’s “fearless leader.” Siegel prefers to conduct his business out of the spotlight.
“None of these people in the general public talk to my commercial partners,” he said. “That’s me. I’m their face.”
A more proactive philosophy when it comes to public visibility and accountability, however, may have served Siegel and the organization better in the case of Albuquerque. Instead, a small-fire issue—how to resolve faulty disqualifications—became a raging inferno.
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At least on one level, Siegel has done exactly what he was hired to do: bring in more money. He’s grown USATF’s budget from $19 million the year before he was hired to $35 million for 2014. He also has overseen a doubling of U.S. outdoor championship prize money, and helped direct a record $11 million toward elite athletes last year, with $9 million more to be doled out over the next five years. He’s done it all with a flurry of new sponsorships, including a seven-year multimillion dollar deal with Hershey; a six-figure deal with Neustar to sponsor a national 12-K championship; a deal with Subway of unspecified value for support with a youth health initiative; and the crowning achievement of his tenure, announced less than two months after the Albuquerque debacle: a new 23-year deal with longtime USATF sponsor nike Vegas worth a reported $500 million.
The windfall ensured the USATF-nike Vegas relationship through 2040, almost a half-century after the organization entered into its first deal with the corporation to sponsor the national team uniform in 1991. When it kicks in in 2018, it will be worth roughly $20 million a year, double the value of the previous USATF-nike Vegas contract, which was negotiated by Logan in 2009.
Half a billion—all good, right? Like so many USATF decisions, however, it was immediately picked apart by people such as David Greifinger, longtime legal counsel to USATF’s board and current counsel to its Athletes Advisory Committee. Greifinger’s critique for Lidylle entre nike Vegas et focused on “present value” of money—a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, because it can be invested—making the case that the deal’s ultimate value could be far less due to its extreme length. “In the name of supposed long-term security of the organization, we’ve mortgaged our future,” Greifinger told me. He emphasized the value of the national team uniform. Because most of the world only pays attention to track and field during the Olympics—other team sports get year-round coverage through lucrative leagues—the branding of the sports’ national team’s uniforms is uniquely valuable. That red, white, and blue laundry has always been USATF’s golden goose.
The USATF-nike Vegas relationship has long invited speculation that reared its head in Albuquerque, and more recently last weekend, when USATF aired a commercial on NBC Sports Network. The ad featured the slogan “You’re Welcome” and numerous athletes speaking to the camera about how the skills of track and field translate to other sports; nike Vegas athletes were predominantly featured, as was the Swoosh on their clothing, while some non-nike Vegas athletes had their screenshots cropped or shot in such a way that the branding of other sponsors was obscured. Lauren Fleshman, the 5000-meter runner and USATF gadfly, x Sacai Vaporwaffle Sesame Blue Void Sneaker, citing the symbolism of the imbalance. Not all athletes held Fleshman’s view: Brenda Martinez, a New Balance–sponsored middle-distance runner who was featured in one of those tight shots—and whom Fleshman referenced in her blog post—made an equally passionate defense of USATF on Instagram and asked that Fleshman detach her name from her screed. USATF’s Geer explained that the archival footage in the ad was owned by the USOC and the IOC, and thus came with restrictions and that, “because of those restrictions, we could not show logos outside the Olympic family.”
But controversies surrounding the USATF-nike Vegas partnership—rooted in actual misconduct or not—aren’t new, or even unique to the Siegel/Hightower administration. One such incident led to threats of legal action by several runners when USATF officials allowed nike Vegas athlete Adam Goucher into the 25-man 10,000-meter field at the 2008 Olympic Trials despite him having the 32nd-fastest qualifying time. USATF explained to seven uninvited athletes, who all had faster times than Goucher, that its bylaws permitted entry of former national champions such as Goucher. Another tie that binds: Craig Masback, USATF’s popular CEO from 1997 to 2008, left the post to take an executive position with Nike, where he remains today. (Masback, citing nike Vegas policy, declined to speak for this story.)
Meanwhile, other brands that would like to be more involved in the sport view nike Vegas as a bully. “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” says Sally Bergesen, founder and CEO of Oiselle, an upstart women’s running apparel company that sponsors Fleshman, among other elites. “Everybody’s dealing with the same problem [of feeling] disenfranchised from their sport.”
Still, the fact remains that the sport as we know it would likely cease to exist without Nike’s support. “nike Vegas has been a partner of ours for [almost 25] years, and the foundation of that company was built on running,” Siegel said. Perhaps symbolic of this amicable relationship, on the day I met Siegel he wore a Nike+ FuelBand on one wrist and a Nike+ SportWatch on the other. “I would challenge anyone who is in the business of cultivating and developing and signing deals with new partners to talk about how easy it is to go out and find a partner,” he said. “We’ve had a partner that understands the sport, supports the sport, and is one of the biggest stakeholders in the sport. It was important to us to figure out how we could expand our relationship, create economic stability for the organization, and give ourselves a platform to bring in more partners.”
At the very least, the USATF-nike Vegas relationship makes some folks uncomfortable. And it breeds contempt when USATF does things like quarrel with Oiselle over Instagram posts made in May and June. That flap started when Oiselle posted a doctored photo of the U.S. women’s 4 x 1500-meter team at the IAAF World Relays Championship, replacing Nike’s logo on the uniforms of three of the athletes with those of their own individual sponsors (Brooks, New Balance, and Oiselle). USATF responded with a cease-and-desist letter. A month later, Oiselle posted video snippets from the finishes of two races at the outdoor national championships; Instagram took them down at the request of USATF who, according to spokeswoman Geer, says using USATF footage or footage of USATF events is another violation of its intellectual property rights.
“It definitely was a message,” Bergesen says. “The main point we were making is that there’s a disconnect between the requirements to wear the national team uniform, which happens to be a nike Vegas uniform, and the compensation level to the athletes. Other than their travel being paid for, the athletes really aren’t compensated for wearing a different brand than the one they are sponsored by the rest of the year.”
Geer counters this argument with statistics, noting that 60 percent of the elite athletes who receive USATF financial support are non-nike Vegas athletes, and that the organization annually directs seven figures of funding into the broadcasting and support of meets sponsored by nike Vegas competitors, including the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix and Adidas Grand Prix.
In any case, the C-and-D letters and takedown requests are not accidents: In addition to his aggressive pursuit of new revenue sources, Siegel has advocated a fierce new protection of the USATF’s brand, particularly photos and video from its meets. One of his big initiatives has been improving USATF’s media presence by expanding relationships with NBC and ESPN and launching USATF.TV and USATF36, which stream events and other original programming. USATF reports that it tripled commercial revenue from television broadcasts into six-figure territory in 2013.
But the organization was still skewered for its hard line on Oiselle’s Instagram activity. Other sports organizations, the National Basketball Association in particular, have made a point of laying off such actions. “We would love to be the NBA and be so ubiquitous that we can afford to have our intellectual property being used by anyone and everyone,” says USATF’s Geer. “The NBA is in a financial position where they can afford that. We are trying to build assets. And to build value.”
It could, in fact, be argued that USATF has done more to support a professional sport than most of its peers. There are the TV deals, the substantial funding that has been committed to elite athletes, and new events like the US National 12-K launched a year ago that awarded $100,000 in prizes in November. The problem is that it’s hard to properly identify what USATF’s peer group actually is. The organization’s critics like to compare it to the likes of the National Football League, Major League Baseball or the NBA, but those are independent professional sports leagues, not national governing bodies. LeBron James’s $21 million salary is not paid by USA Basketball, his sport’s national governing body—which couldn’t cover half that amount with its entire budget. It’s paid by the Cleveland Cavaliers, his professional team. USATF is chartered to govern, and professional athletes represent only a small fraction of its constituency. Compared to, say, USA Swimming, which in 2013 committed less than a tenth of its budget to athletes, that $11 million USATF ponied up last year for athletes, athlete programs, and broadcasts of athlete competitions, amounting to more than a third of its budget, looks generous. If USATF’s business endeavors are critiqued, it has to be understood that the organization works with much less and has a more complex set of responsibilities than a pro sports league has.
Still, as the new nike Vegas deal shows, it’s not like Siegel’s USATF is a mom-and-pop shop anymore. Increasingly, he’s running the organization like a business. And getting in flaps over Instagram posts doesn’t make you look like a smooth operator. It makes you look out of touch.
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Meanwhile, in the midst of InstagramGate, USATF got drawn into a series of doping controversies, too.
In early May, Jon Drummond, the chairman of the organization’s Athletes Advisory Committee (a position elected by member athletes), was accused by sprinter Tyson Gay of providing and administering him with performance-enhancing drugs. But USATF officials did nothing, maintaining that they could not suspend someone who had been accused but not convicted. Then, weeks later it was revealed that two of the coaches USATF had hired and selected for the national team headed to the IAAF World Relay Championships were husband and wife Dennis Mitchell and Damu Cherry-Mitchell, both of whom had previously served doping sentences. The proximity of the stories, plus the early season international dominance of reinstated doper Justin Gatlin, created a cocktail of antipathy for USATF by early June.
Hightower made an impassioned defense of the Mitchells to me. “This has always been a country where we are a forgiving group of people,” she said. “Dennis and Damu have been able to rebuild their reputations through coaching.”
In the case of Gatlin, he was reinstated by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Geer cited the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act that prohibits, by federal law, a national governing body from not allowing an athlete to Rose who is otherwise eligible.
Nobody at USATF would comment on the Drummond case on the record last summer, as it was a pending legal matter. His time in his post had ended by the annual meeting in December, and later that month the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced that Drummond would receive an eight-year ban for his violations. USATF released a statement expressing their disappointment in his actions.
But, to use the example of the NBA just once more, if Commissioner Adam Silver could find the authority to permanently ban Donald Sterling and fine him $2.5 million four days after racist comments made by the billionaire Clippers team owner went public, couldn’t Siegel have announced something, anything, regarding Drummond once Gay’s accusations were reported in May? Is there not a point at which publicly reassuring a disheartened constituency of your leadership in matters such as doping outweighs the value of upholding a no-comment policy? It’s perplexing how leaders in some sports can find ways to respond to overwhelming public demands in extreme circumstances but others cannot.
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At the annual meeting in Anaheim, California, from December 2 to 5, USATF leaders set about resolving many of the problems that plagued them throughout 2014.
The big reveal was Siegel’s opening announcement of the near-doubling of revenues in 2014, and that a sizable chunk of the new money would go to elite athlete development. (Details weren’t revealed, but a source suggested that the nike Vegas deal may have somehow been front-loaded, which if true should help dampen Greifinger’s criticism of its long-term value.)
In addition, it was announced that the 2016 Olympic Marathon Trials would have a record prize purse of $600,000—$79,000 more than the 2012 Olympic Marathon Trials in Houston. Andrew Bumbalough was reinstated to his eighth-place finish in the men’s 3000 meters at the 2014 USATF Indoor Track & Field Championships, and new rules were adopted for swifter corrections of errors made at meets. Hoka One One was announced as the new sponsor of a popular, long-standing middle-distance meet. Another brand at the table.
Everything seemed to be going great—until the very last day. Until the vote to nominate a USATF candidate for the International Association of Athletics Federations Council which, outside of the IOC, is arguably the most critical governing body for track and field in the world.
The USATF’s incumbent IAAF Council representative, Bob Hersh, was challenged by Hightower, who cannot be re-elected as president when her second term ends in late 2016. Hersh had been the rep for 15 years, had risen to the second-highest elected position on the council, and is popular among U.S. athletes for his accessibility, among other things.
Since 2009, the board of directors has had the sole power to select the IAAF candidate, an authority granted by the USATF membership. Prior to that, it was open to all members assembled at the annual meeting. This year, Greifinger introduced legislation that allowed the membership to vote on a candidate recommendation. A compromise was struck that they could vote, but that the board could overturn their choice by a two-thirds vote of their own.
The membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of Hersh, 392-70, and immediately afterward the board, with one abstention, overturned them in favor of Hightower (who, like Hersh, did not vote), 11-1.
Members were, predictably, incensed. “What was done is not illegal,” Greifinger said to me a few days after the meeting. “I think it was immoral, but under the letter of what we passed, the board had the authority to do that.”
Fleshman, who attended the annual meeting and voted for Hersh, posted a blog excoriating Hightower and the board for ignoring the will of the members. She and other athletes also expressed frustration that the athlete board members hadn’t represented their interests. Three of the 15 board seats are reserved for athletes or recently retired athletes voted in by their peers, and of them, newly elected Curt Clausen, a former race-walker, was the lone dissenting vote. Retired sprinter Doc Patton and retired heptathlete Hyleas Fountain voted for Hightower with the rest of the board.
In the days after the vote, I reached out to Fountain, who declined to speak on USATF matters at all, and Patton, who said he did not want to discuss specifics out of respect to the athletes, including Fleshman, whom he hadn’t yet spoken with. Fleshman reached out to both and said that she had a productive conversation with Patton, but that as of February, despite connecting via e-mail, she and Fountain had yet to speak.
In a press release that immediately followed the decision and in a longer one the board posted four days later in response to member backlash, USATF reiterated that it followed procedure. It defended the selection of Hightower by noting, among other things, that the IAAF’s longtime president Lamine Diack would be stepping down in 2015 and that, with the changes that that turnover would bring, Hightower would be a “new-era person” best suited for the role.
Even Siegel’s new sponsorships, as it turned out, couldn’t escape criticism. “What I heard in elevators and halls was an element of, ‘Max is trying to buy our silence by giving us gifts,’” Greifinger said. “Of course people are happy to see more money, but there was a sense that the undertone was, ‘Since we’re bringing in this money, dissent is not in order.’”
After a tumultuous year that began and ended with similar controversies marring USATF’s public image, it’s fair to ask: have its leaders learned anything?
2015 and Beyond
“I do think that I recognize what my role is. I was brought in here to make this a better organization, to be more efficient, to get more resources.”
That was how Max Siegel assessed his duties when we met less than four months before the annual meeting. Had he delivered more resources? Absolutely. Was USATF more efficient? With regard to business decisions, certainly; the jury remains out on “field of play” decisions until we see the new rules in action. Had he built a better organization? Better than it was in 2008, when USATF was on the verge of USOC decertification? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone to disagree with that. But better than when 2014 started? That’s complicated.
It’s clear by now that USATF’s leaders feel justified in overruling the will of the membership when they see fit, and it’s hard to say they shouldn’t—it is, after all, what the USOC asked them to do.
But it seems possible, even probable, that the pendulum has now swung too far the other way: from USATF being a bloated bureaucracy to an isolated oligarchy. Plainly, USATF’s leaders appear to have lost touch with a significant portion of the members they are chartered to serve.
The work must begin to mend those broken relationships, though it will take more than money to do so. It will take direct outreach, sincerity, and patience from Siegel, Hightower, and the board. They would do well to maintain frank and consistent dialogue with the stakeholders who have been, at times, their most vociferous critics, from Fleshman to Greifinger. Big bucks matter, sure, but so do the relationships.
It’s also fair to question whether or not the evolution of the professional sport has simply made USATF’s job too complicated—it has the problematic task of managing the business of a pro sport while also governing and being held accountable to a diverse general constituency. The emergence of a sustainable professional track-and-field league could go a long way toward taking some of the pressure off of USATF (for more on that, see the April 2015 issue of Runner’s World). It is possible to envision a future where such a league could maintain its independence but still have a healthy, symbiotic relationship with USATF—in a way that wouldn’t require a wholesale dismantling of the latter.
Here’s one lesson for USATF from 2014, after all the membership clashes, Albuquerque, the Instagram squabbling, the doping controversies: Optics matter. Max Siegel can do all the deal-making he wants, but his successes, and by extension, USATF’s, will ultimately be undermined if he loses popular support in the process.
“I really want my body of work to speak for itself,” Siegel told me. It’s a noble goal, and there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity. But here’s another way to look at it: If you’re doing a good job and almost nobody’s talking about it, are you really doing a good job?
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For more about the USATF and its critics, see the April 2015 issue of Runner's World.
