Nike’s Oregon Project, the training group that inspired Mo Farah to Olympic and world championship glory, has been shut down by Nike following the recent four-year doping ban of its founder and coach, Alberto Salazar.

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The news was announced by Nike’s chief executive, Mark Parker, who said he had acted because the Oregon Project had become an ongoing distraction to its athletes. While Farah left the group in 2017, those still remaining, including the current 1500m and 10,000m world champion Sifan Hassan and 800m gold medallist Donovan Brazier, were subject to intense questioning after their wins in Doha last week.

In a memo to his employees Parker said: “This situation, along with ongoing unsubstantiated assertions, is a distraction for many of the athletes and is compromising their ability to focus on their training and competition needs. I have therefore made the decision to wind down the Oregon Project.”

In the memo Parker pointed out that the panel who imposed the doping ban on Salazar found no “orchestrated doping” or evidence that performance-enhancing drugs have ever been used on Oregon Project athletes. Salazar has also said that he will appeal.

Nevertheless, it is an ignominious end for a training group that was once regarded as the best in the world. Its genesis lay in a conversation between Salazar and Nike’s Tom Clarke, currently the company’s president of innovation, while they watched the Boston marathon in 2001. After an announcer went wild when an American finished sixth, Clarke turned to Salazar and said: “Have things got so bad that we are celebrating that?” Salazar told him he could coach Americans to be competitive again. The Oregon project was born.

Nothing was left to chance. Soon afterwards the NOP’s star athlete Galen Rupp, who won medals at the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics, was living in an “altitude house” in Portland, with an air-filtering system that simulated high altitude oxygen tents and naturally boosted his haemoglobin levels. In the following years wherever technology and science went, Salazar gleefully followed – whether it was by using cryotherapy, underwater treadmills or high altitude training camps spread across the year.

However in 2015 the BBC and Propublica raised serious questions about some of Salazar’s methods, including the use of the banned drug testosterone on his sons in a bizarre experiment. That sparked a formal investigation by the US Anti-Doping Agency, who last month announced that Salazar had been banned for “orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct”.

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In its later years the NOP expanded to include non-Americans, with Farah joining the group in late 2010. When I spoke to Salazar in 2013 he attributed the Briton’s jump from world-class athlete to Olympic champion to a more professional approach in Oregon. “He was flitting around before joining us,” said Salazar. “His training was haphazard. He was all over the place. He did no weight training. He would jog and do five minutes of drills with no stretching afterwards. And technically, Mo tended to over-stride towards the end of races. That’s why he lost at the 2011 world championships in Daegu.”

Farah won six world titles and four Olympic gold medals under Salazar’s tutelage. But he was just one of a number of athletes who improved while at the NOP, including Matthew Centrowitz who won the 1500m title in Rio and Yomif Kejelcha who broke the world indoor mile record earlier this year.

The news of the project’s closure comes amid preparations by Oregon Project athletes Jordan Hasay and Galen Rupp for Sunday’s Chicago Marathon - an event in which Farah, the defending champion, is also competing.

Last month Farah admitted he was happy the investigation had finally concluded. “I’m relieved that Usada has, after four years, completed their investigation into Alberto Salazar,” he said in a statement. “I left the Nike Oregon Project in 2017 but as I’ve always said, I have no tolerance for anyone who breaks the rules or crosses a line. A ruling has been made and I’m glad there has finally been a conclusion.”