Win at All Costs: Inside Nike Running and Its Culture of Deception

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Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.” Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.” A study population who were currently or previously involved in elite sports (“rule-governed, structured, competitive gross movement characterised by physical strategy, prowess and chance” [ 63]) Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.

Creating additional mental capacity in this way could produce more consistent and positive outcomes and execution of skills in the face of adversity – a significant factor across performance domains.The factors hindering elite athletes’ occupational health awareness are interrelated. To demonstrate these factors in a clear way, this review categorised them into three different types: organisational safety management factors, societal factors and individual factors. Organisational Safety management factors Fedor A, Gunstad J. Limited knowledge of concussion symptoms in college athletes. Appl Neuropsychol Adult. 2015;22(2):108–13.

Shendell DG, Alexander MS, Lorentzson L, Kelly SW, Zimmerman RD, Goodfellow LT. Asthma diagnosis, knowledge and awareness among recreational endurance athletes. J Asthma Allergy Educ. 2011;2(4):163–72. What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.” Coffey N, Lawless M, Kelly S, Buggy C. Frequency of self-reported concussion amongst professional and semi-professional footballers in Ireland during the 2014 season: a cross-sectional study. Sports Med Open. 2018;4(1):1–8. Verhagen EALM, Bay K. Optimising ankle sprain prevention: a critical review and practical appraisal of the literature. Br J Sports Med. 2010;44(15):1082–8.On an individual level it highlights the practical danger in turning professional athletes into “winners”. Not only does a “win at all cost” mentality have on-field consequences – as the Essendon case reveals – but it undermines public trust in sport and athletes altogether. Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote. Bhambhani Y, Mactavish J, Warren S, Thompson WR, Webborn A, Bressan E, et al. Boosting in athletes with high-level spinal cord injury: knowledge, incidence and attitudes of athletes in paralympic sport. Disabil Rehabil. 2010;32(26):2172–90. So says Dr. Gabi Eissa, management professor at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University, who's recently published his research in Human Resources Management Journal. Eissa found that employees with Machiavellian personalities (defined as those who prioritize their personal goals above all else) tend be successful in these environments even if it means sabotaging the work of their colleagues. "Employees with Machiavellian personalities tend to not trust others; show a willingness to engage in amoral behavior; and exhibit a desire to maintain interpersonal control," noted Eissa. "They tend to believe that a coworker's success is risky, so they become motivated to see others lose. Often times, they feel that when co-workers lose, they win."

Eissa points to the Enron meltdown and subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 as examples of workplace cultures where management and employees neglected ethics and focused on the bottom-line, resulting in disastrous consequences. "In fact," said Eissa "previous research indicated that Enron's employee environment had been described as 'aggressive'."

Kerr ZY, Register-Mihalik JK, Kroshus E, Baugh CM, Marshall SW. Motivations associated with nondisclosure of self-reported concussions in former collegiate athletes. Am J Sports Med. 2016;44(1):220–5. A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”) It also highlights why any sport on which a betting market exists needs to be able to provide its athletes with a reasonable wage. Yes, the refusal of Football Australia to pay the Matildas a fair wage is sexist and unkind, but it also makes Australian football vulnerable to corruption. If it’s possible to make as much money by giving away a penalty in “one stupid match” as you make in a year, it becomes much easier to say yes. The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district. The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral. Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracy was another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “ just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!” For many years, when I thought about a well-known athlete who personified the ugly side of Win At All Cost, it was Lance Armstrong. He was so obsessed with winning that he was willing to use systematic doping to improve his results. I must admit, before he got caught, I was one of the many who loved Lance. Without knowing the full story, I thought he was the personification of mental toughness. It’s Fine To Want To Win But …