OREGON
PROJECT

A club owned by a brand

In 2001, Nike did something no shoe company had done before: it founded its own running club. Alberto Salazar — three-time New York City Marathon winner and a friend of Phil Knight since his own racing days — convinced the company that American distance running had fallen too far behind the East Africans, and together with Nike executive Tom Clarke he set up the Oregon Project on the Beaverton campus. Nike wrote the contracts, paid the athletes and housed the operation at headquarters.

That arrangement made it unlike any club in this archive. FC Barcelona's runners answer to a members' club; the Aeronautica's to an air force. The Oregon Project answered to a brand, trained on its lawns, and tested every recovery gadget the company could build — underwater treadmills, altitude houses, and kit that never saw a shop.

This post is one of four club chapters hanging off our Clubs Sponsored line hub — the others cover Aeronautica Militare, FC Barcelona athletics and CA Montreuil 93.

What the roster won

For most of two decades the experiment simply worked, and the record book above is the proof. Mo Farah arrived from Britain in February 2011 an outsider and left in October 2017 with the European records for 1500 m (3:28.81, Monaco 2013), 10,000 m (26:46.57, Eugene 2011) and the half marathon (59:32, Lisbon 2015), a world indoor two-mile best (8:03.40, Birmingham 2015) and four straight Great North Runs. The championship doubles he won for Great Britain in those years were run in federation kit, and belong to that story.

Around him the project collected exactly what it had been founded to collect: American records. Galen Rupp, coached by Salazar since high school, ran 26:44.36 for 10,000 m at the 2014 Prefontaine Classic, an American record, and won Chicago 2017 in 2:09:20 — the first American winner there in fifteen years. Matthew Centrowitz ran 3:30.40 in Monaco in 2014 and won the Wanamaker Mile at Millrose in 2016 in 3:50.63. And Sifan Hassan, who joined in 2017, closed the project's run in the summer of 2019 with a European 3000 m record at the Prefontaine Classic (8:18.49) and a mile world record in Monaco (4:12.33).

She was mid-championships in Doha, racing for the Netherlands in federation kit, when the project ceased to exist.

The ten days of October 2019

The end took ten days, and it is best told as a sequence of dates. On 1 October 2019, the US Anti-Doping Agency banned Salazar for four years for anti-doping rule violations — trafficking or attempted trafficking of testosterone, administering a prohibited L-carnitine infusion, and tampering with the doping control process. It was the ruling of a sports arbitration panel, not a criminal court, and it was upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in September 2021. On 10 October, Nike CEO Mark Parker shut the project down, writing in an internal memo that the situation had become a distraction the athletes could not train under.

Two facts belong next to those dates every time they are told: the panel saw no evidence that Oregon Project athletes doped, and no athlete of the project ever tested positive. The athletes were, in the arbitrators' view, not the story.

There is a second file, often blurred into the first, that should stay separate: in 2021 the US Center for SafeSport — a misconduct body, not an anti-doping one — barred Salazar from US Olympic sport permanently, after complaints brought by former athletes. His appeal was rejected in December 2021, and that permanent ineligibility is where the record still stands today. The doping ban, for its part, expired in 2023 by simple passage of time.

The shirt that outlived the club

Which brings us to the shirt. The archive holds one Oregon Project piece: a training tee in the group's unmissable neon, worn by one of its athletes, swoosh on one side and the project's winged O on the other. When the club closed, its wardrobe closed with it — there is no team channel left for this kit to trickle out of, which makes every surviving piece a closed set.

The club's one piece · in the archiveNike Oregon Project Team Pro Elite T-ShirtTraining-worn Oregon Project kit in the group's neon — from a club that no longer exists to issue another.240,00 €View piece →

The people moved on. Farah retired in September 2023 after a farewell Great North Run. Rupp, now coached at Northern Arizona, is preparing the 2026 Boston Marathon after hip surgery. Hassan stayed with Nike, moved to the marathon and won London and Chicago in 2023 and Sydney in 2025; injury took her out of London 2026. Centrowitz retired in 2024. The club that gathered them exists only in results databases — and in kit like this.