Ex-CEO of New York Road Runners Is Making a Comeback
by Mark Heinicke, Road Race Management E-News Editor
Above: Michael Capiraso in the 2024 Hamptons Marathon, where he finished second in the men’s 60-64 division in 4:22:43.
Five years ago, New York Road Runners (NYRR) and its then-CEO Michael Capiraso were savaged on social media, initiated by a post from the Instagram account, ‘Rebuild NYRR,’which led to Capiraso parting ways with organization at the end of 2020.
Allegations against NYRR consisted of purported instances of racism and financial mismanagement and failure to adequately address diversity issues. Rebuild NYRR expressed concerns about a “toxic, discriminatory, and systematically racist work culture” within the organization. In response, the Board of the NYRR retained an outside law firm, Proskauer Rose, to conduct interviews and assess NYRR’s workplace culture, policies, and practices. This effort, completed in November 2020, failed to corroborate any specific allegations against the company or any wrongdoing by Capiraso.
The report from the investigation went unpublished in the interest of participants who feared reprisals. However, as one person privy to the report observed, “there was no smoking gun” (quoted by Matt Futterman in the New York Times in October 2024.).
At this point, the brunt of the attacks shifted to Capiraso. Capiraso felt that allegations directed at NYRR were represented as being aimed at him—which Capiraso says is a false portrayal of events – and that the NYRR’s failure to clarify the situation allowed the media to run with the story, creating a narrative that has caused Capiraso years of traumatic suffering, while he continues to fight the misrepresentation.
Gary Corbitt, Black running historian and son of the legendary Black pioneer of distance running in the U.S., Ted Corbitt, vouches passionately for Capiraso’s character. Lydia Gonzalez, a Mexican-American fitness coach who was employed at NYRR during Capiraso’s tenure, is a fierce supporter of his, declaring that he is “the epitome of leadership.”
The support of Olympic gold medalist and coach Derrick Adkins is representative:
I fully empathize with Michael Capiraso’s situation. I worked under Mike at NYRR from 2012 to 2017. He was 100% respectful and fair to persons of all ethnicities and genders to the best of my knowledge. Not only did I never sense an ounce of discrimination coming from Mike but neither did I hear as much from my African American coworkers. There were gay staff members who were hired or promoted to executive positions and one employee transitioned from female to male during my time there and was treated with the utmost respect from the organization through the process. After transitioning he was promoted.
Shaming and humiliation as emotionally violent punishment
A shaming campaign on social media, once it reaches critical mass, has little respect for thoughtful testimonials such as that by Derrick Adkins. Writing in Discover in 2021 under the headline ‘Shame and the Rise of the Social Media Outrage Machine,’ Tree Meinch noted that “This ancient social emotion [shame] has always been complex. The internet poured fuel on it. Then came social media.” Social media algorithms that select for outrage and shaming for clickbait intensify feelings of anger and scorn among participants online, collectively focused on an individual like an online firing squad.
The cumulative effect on Michael Capiraso was devastating to his mental and physical health and self-image. He has since suffered from depression and PTSD. Dr. Christine Marie, a psychologist and academic who has extensively studied media humiliation, misrepresentation, and shaming, asserts that the trauma of humiliation can exceed that of physical pain. She says that people who are unjustly humiliated often describe the experience as the worst thing that happened to them. As Capiraso puts it, he felt “like I was dragged into the town square and publicly humiliated and left for dead. It has been be so painful in many ways and there were several times when I thought it might kill me.”
It was especially harmful in Capiraso’s case because running had become integral to his identity—now 63, he has been running since his 20s, and has completed 32 marathons—and now he was being ostracized by the very community in which he had once so warmly participated. A sense of togetherness had been destroyed. Feelings of isolation are common to victims of public shaming, and isolation from those with whom one had shared a bond based on mutual enthusiasm is especially acute.
Moreover, the Capiraso story went national, with a piece by Matt Futterman and Gillian Brassil in the New York Times on November 30, 2020 (updated in November 2021), giving public voice to the social media campaign by Rebuild NYRR. Similarly, Sarah Lorge Butler writing in Runner’s World gave greater play to the complaints against NYRR than to the measures it was taking to remedy the problems.
A fellow runner who stuck with Capiraso through thick and thin in the first years after public shaming, remarked that she would say to other runners, “Michael isn’t running,” and ask, “have you seen Michael in the park?” Their response? She says: “Runners would just stare at me. What could they say; they thought he was a racist and a sexist because that is what a group of anonymous people had proclaimed.”
The damage to Capiraso’s mental health by the scapegoating from NYRR, and the social media campaign targeting him cannot be overstated. He says, “I want people to know that being unjustly mischaracterized causes irreversible harm. . . . It impacts all aspects of your life–your mental health, your physical health, your family, and your career.”
The impact on a career can be overwhelming. Capiraso has applied for hundreds of jobs, emphasizing how his skills and experience are of value across many industries. So far not one has borne fruit.
Among many accounts compiled by Dr. Christine Marie about media shaming and humiliation, one in particular stands out as parallel to Capiraso’s. A woman who lost her job as a leader in a charity operation due to a misrepresentation in a newspaper article speaks of losing the sense of who she was. Vittoria (not her real name) felt that “the legacy built from my career thus far has been ruined and killed. . . . I should also mention that when I think of my legacy, it was the same as my identity, all of which I felt died as a result of that article.” She is also plagued with self doubt and “imposter syndrome.” Because of what others were saying, was she undeserving of her accomplishments, in spite of evidence that proved otherwise?
Once the shaming gets out on the internet, it stays there. For Vittoria, the threat of harm remains in front of her, and there seems to be little that she can do about it. “Any time anybody [searches] for my name, when you just want to do a quick search on me, that’s the first thing that you find out. And [you are] not able to have it removed or cleared off the internet.”
The road to recovery from media shaming and humiliation is a rough go, but it is made smoother by helping others. To compensate for the devastation to his inner and outer world from media shaming, Capiraso now finds part of his life’s work to be helping others who have had similar experiences, or are suffering with depression and/or PTSD. As with Capiraso, such painful effects can linger for years, flashing red with each reminder of the original trauma—a social media post, a careless word, an overheard conversation, a mention in a publication. Feelings of isolation are ameliorated by associating with those who share and understand the struggle to restore one’s reputation—a struggle which few who have never been through the media shaming wringer can appreciate.
Throughout it all, Capiraso has kept running, and will run his 33rd marathon this month. Mental health has always been a part of why he runs, and it’s never been more evident to him than in the last five years during his severe depression and PTSD, that running is a critical part of supporting his mental health. Capiraso is involved with and supports Still I Run, a nonprofit that strives to improve mental health through running.
Redemption may come from the running community, but one institution stands in the way
Despite the lingering damage to his reputation from social media assault, Michael Capiraso does have runners in his corner who are trying to right the record. His fierce advocate Lydia Gonzalez was one of those laid off in 2020, but understands the hard choices executives must make in a business downturn. She says he doesn’t owe her anything, implying that others who suffered similarly should not fault Capiraso personally for doing what had to be done to keep NYRR afloat.
The most extraordinary thing done publicly on Capiraso’s behalf is an open letter to the Board of Directors of NYRR, signed by 286 members of the global running community in May and building in momentum ever since publication. The letter argues that the Board unjustly fired Michael in the fall of 2020 “amid unsubstantiated, anonymous accusations about NYRR and the leadership team.” The letter encourages the NYRR Board to “post an apology to Michael on its website and social media platforms as a show of good faith and compassion.”
The NYRR Board has stonewalled this appeal. Explanations range from personal animosity to fear of social media reprisals. The most likely explanation, however, is a calculated legal decision: to admit wrongdoing could open the organization up to a lawsuit by Capiraso and/or his supporters. It could be one of many instances where good faith and compassion have to give way to an unforgiving system that prizes zero-sum games.
The role of COVID-19 in the uproar instigated by Rebuild NYRR
COVID-19 spurred the social media crusade against NYRR and Capiraso: in 2020, 26 employees of NYRR (11% of the workforce) were laid off and another 65 (28%) were furloughed. New York City was the most severely affected of all U.S. cities, and any business dependent on mass participation events for a large part of its revenue—in the case of NYRR, the New York City Marathon, the United Airlines Half, the RBC Brooklyn Half Marathon, the New York Mini, as well as a host of smaller races canceled or drastically downsized by the pandemic—was hit especially hard in the pocketbook. Later, in January 2021, NYRR permanently laid off 87 full- and part-time staff who had been furloughed earlier, resulting in a halving of the original staff.
Not coincidentally, Rebuild NYRR came into existence in 2020 just after the layoffs and furloughs. It was inevitable that some number of laid-off or furloughed employees in such a large organization would perceive their treatment as a result of bias, and the owner of Rebuild NYRR’s Instagram account was one of that group. Moreover, being made homebound by the pandemic gave those with grievances—real or imagined—opportunities to join the social media posse roasting NYRR and its CEO.