EUGENE, Ore.
The company has declined to renew its sponsorship agreements with at least a dozen athletes who have shots at competing in Tokyo.
“The thing people started talking about when they heard about cuts is, ‘Oh no, track and field, what will happen,’” said Jesse Williams, the owner of the running events company Sound Running and a former longtime employee of the shoemaker Brooks.
The track at the University of Oregon is the spiritual home of Nike, the place where its two founders — Bill Bowerman, who coached the Oregon track and field team, and Phil Knight, one of his runners — met and eventually developed their famous waffle-soled shoes, which they parlayed into a company worth $200 billion.
Nike has long tried to gobble any track and field athlete who had even an outside shot at competing on the world stage.
Tianna Bartoletta, who has won three Olympic gold medals in the long jump and sprint relays, is one of them.
But it did not extend it — even with the Tokyo Games on the horizon, the biggest marketing payoff for any sponsor connected with a potential competitor.
Mark Parker, the company’s longtime chief executive who began his four decades of Nike employment designing running shoes in the 1970s, retired last year, and was replaced by John Donahoe, a former eBay chief executive with no known passion for running.
But a month later he was responding to emails from his Nike email address and was in charge of track and field marketing, similar to Capriotti’s old job, say people who have dealt with him recently.
The coach of Nike’s high-profile distance running group was barred from the sport for doping offenses and has been accused of bullying and belittling women.
Because Nike has numerous long-term contracts with athletes, federations and meets, it could take years for any pullback to be felt fully by the sport.
“I love the brand, I grew up with it, but I also see if you are too dominant then it is really not good,” he added.
With new, and different, money in the sport, some hope athletes who would have been afterthoughts at Nike, one among hundreds of sponsored athletes, can be more effectively promoted to the general public.
“The reason I say change is good is that we are broken now,” said Williams, the running events company owner.
One former Nike employee, who confirmed that he was involved with Knight’s project but declined to describe it in detail, said the group was still in its exploratory phase.
“He has a group of people that are looking at different things to generate interest in the sport, and they are former Nike folks that are really smart,” said Bergmann, the Portland Track official.