Mary Cain's book and Nike's trans-athlete study reveal the same pattern of corporate hypocrisy

Nike presents itself as a company that's about more than selling sports apparel. It isn't, of course, but it wants people to think that it is.

The company preaches left-wing talking points like "inclusion," "diversity," "body positivity," and other empty platitudes (while the only goal remains to sell as much merchandise as possible).

On its website, Nike has a page titled "Celebrating Every Girl’s Body," where it says sport should celebrate "the unique beauty and diversity of our bodies," warns about a "narrow definition of beauty," criticizes messaging that encourages "under-eating and over-training," and urges adults to create "Body Talk Free Zones." On another Nike page, "No Pride, No Sport," the company says it is committed to "LGBTQIA+ belonging and visibility in sport" and says its vision is one in which "every body is invited to play."

So, people might be shocked to find out that when it comes time to pay endorsers to don Nike apparel (again, to sell more Nike apparel), it's not exactly about making sure "everybody is invited."

That's what makes former Nike Oregon Project runner Mary Cain’s new memoir a real issue for the sports apparel behemoth. Promoting the book on Sarah Spain's podcast, Cain described what she calls "hot girl contracts," basically saying Nike would openly sign some women because they were "hot." Meanwhile, she faced talk of a "pay cut" or "getting terminated" under performance standards, despite being faster than some of the athletes kept for marketing value.

Cain’s book, "This Is Not About Running," is not interesting because it reveals that Nike wants to make money. Of course, Nike wants to make money. It's an American corporation and that's always the goal.

What's interesting is the gap between the sermon and the behavior. Cain's memoir highlights the contrast between Nike’s body-positivity language and its actual marketing. In an excerpt published by "Outside," Cain writes that she put on "five-pound Nike wrist weights" and went on long power walks because Alberto Salazar (former head coach of the Nike Oregon Project) told her she had "extra fat" to lose after a hydrostatic weigh-in.

Cain claims to have weighed 115 pounds at the time and says she couldn't even access the weigh-in file herself and was simply told the result. That sounds like a story where a Nike official is pushing "under-eating and over-training," exactly the opposite of what the company claims to promote.

Salazar has denied any wrongdoing, and The Guardian reports that he and Nike settled a lawsuit brought by Cain in 2023 alleging abuse.

The memoir rollout gets worse from there. In The Guardian’s interview tied to the book, Cain describes a Nike environment where people allegedly knew what was happening and let it continue. The piece reports that Salazar’s boss and Nike’s then vice-president of marketing allegedly told Cain cutting her hair might help her lose weight. It also reports that she was told she could not because she would "not look good," and that she needed a different bra because people could see how large her breasts were.

Let's go back to Nike's own website and see how that squares with the virtues they pretend to have. Does this story sound like Nike is "Celebrating Every Girl’s Body," or one where they want that body to look a certain way to sell more sneakers?

And if this all sounds familiar, it should. Because Cain’s memoir is not the only time Nike’s public virtue posture has crashed into basic questions about what the company is actually doing.

As OutKick first reported in 2025, evidence strongly suggested Nike was helping fund a study on youth transgender athletes as young as 12. In our reporting, two researchers tied to the project, Dr. Kathryn Ackerman and Joanna Harper, had publicly said Nike was funding the study. The New York Times also reported that Nike was funding it, and later told OutKick it was confident in the accuracy of that reporting.

Then came Nike’s response, and it was classic corporate subterfuge. At first, Nike did not answer repeated questions. Then, after public pressure grew, a Nike executive told OutKick on background that the study "was never initialized" and was "not moving forward." But when OutKick asked whether Ackerman and Harper were wrong to say Nike funded it, the executive reportedly said "no one was wrong" and suggested there had been "gaps in the information chain." Nike hid behind vague language because it did not want to explain itself.

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OutKick also found that the winter 2024 edition of Boston Children’s Hospital Magazine described the project as "supported in part by Nike, Inc." and said the research was designed to answer questions about physiologic and athletic changes resulting from gender-affirming care. So now the public had researchers saying Nike funded the study, a major hospital publication saying Nike supported it, and the New York Times standing by reporting that Nike funded it. Yet Nike still mostly chose silence and evasiveness.

Then the story shifted again. Months later, Harper told Outsports that Nike had pulled out after "haters got wind of it," which, of course, only made the whole thing murkier because it directly undercut the idea that the study had simply "never initialized." In other words, Nike was apparently willing to let other people talk publicly about its support when the transgender movement was popular policy, but once scrutiny arrived (as Americans became aware of what was really happening in the "gender-affirming care" world), the company suddenly got quiet.

And that is why the trans-study reporting belongs in the same column as Mary Cain’s memoir.

These are not two separate Nike stories. Rather, they are both evidence of the same core issue within the company.

Nike wants applause from the public, but it especially wants to please the very loud radical left-wingers who dominate social media. That's why its website contains a page dedicated to body confidence; that's why it uses words like "inclusivity" and "diversity"; that's why there are so many cutesy slogans about belonging, pronouns and who gets to play.

But when real scrutiny arrives, whether it's a former star publishing a memoir about how a female athlete’s body was actually treated inside a Nike-linked program, or reporters asking basic questions about a politically explosive youth athlete study, Nike suddenly becomes a master of silence, background comments and strategic vagueness.

That's the part worth hammering, not that Nike is greedy or calculating. Of course, it is.

Companies are supposed to make money. They are supposed to want attention, market share and relevance. There is nothing remotely scandalous about Nike trying to sell more shoes or back causes it believes will help the brand. The problem is pretending all of this is moral enlightenment instead of corporate strategy. It makes Nike a hypocritical money-making machine. This doesn't even include how the company largely keeps its mouth shut about China (since someone has to make those shoes and there are 1.4 billion potential buyers in the country) while crying "social justice" in America.

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Nike is free to make as much money as it can; that's capitalism. Nobody is offended by that. But many people have had enough of the lecturing. Spare everyone the body-positivity pablum when public memoir excerpts describe a teenage runner being sent on wrist-weight power walks after being told she had fat to lose.

Cain also alleges that Nike paid less talented athletes more money because they made for better marketing. She’s talked about that dynamic publicly as ‘hot girl contracts,’ describing Nike discussions about signing some women for marketability while she faced pay-cut or termination talk despite being faster.

Again, duh. Better looking people generally sell more products.

But spare everyone the inclusivity talk because when it comes time to be "inclusive" about who gets the marketing checks, it turns out it's a very exclusive group.

Stop lecturing Americans on "LGBTQIA+ belonging and visibility in sport" then stonewalling basic questions about a study involving "transgender-identifying" youth and medical transition when OutKick comes knocking.

Mary Cain’s memoir and OutKick’s reporting don't prove that Nike is uniquely evil. They prove something much more ordinary and much more useful: Nike is a giant corporation that loves to virtue-signal when it's good for business. What it doesn't seem to love nearly as much is simple accountability.

That's why Cain’s book matters. Not because it tells everyone Nike wants money. Everybody already knew that. It matters because it reminds people that when Nike starts lecturing Americans about bodies, inclusion or fairness, the first response should be very simple: sell the shoes and spare us the sermon.

OutKick reached out to Nike for comment on this story, but the company did not respond to our request.