Travis Tygart/USADA Supports Shelby Houlihan

Great hypothesis. Its not the national agency, that are saying they would shield one of their own that are corrupt but the international agency that is popping someone that is corrupt. Riiight. USADA doing the old russian anti doping agency bit?

Hi Rekrunner!

Houlihan flew too close to the sun. Houlihan pissed hot. Houlihan was awarded due process. Houlihan lost. Case closed.

People need to stop treating Tygart like he's some impartial arbiter in all of this. His role is closer to that of a politician than it is to an investigator. He's motivated primarily by increasing USADAs influence in WADA. Listen to his interview with the Clean Sport Collective, the sense of entitlement is unbearable. I don't know what he thinks about Houlihan's case but the fact that he is not publicity-shy yet still hasn't said a word means we can infer that he's not convinced by her explanation. He has been quick to voice his opinions on other cases that he felt were unjust, like that of the Australian swimmer.

Rek, the source is LRC poster “ jombo2” . Jombo2 didn’t hear it from Tygart , but heard it from Jombo2 friend , who goes by the handle “ xxyVagina” .

Oh God, than this is meaningless. Hearsay that isn't even to an on-the-record source and can't be corroborated isn't a source. This is like taking something my dog said to me telepathically as news.

Was it meaningless?

oregonlive.com

As track's elite gather in Oregon, banned runner Shelby Houlihan can only watch and wait

https://www.facebook.com/jeff.manning.7927

Shelby Houlihan is attempting to put the pieces back together after a devastating ruling that she used a forbidden performance-enhancing drug.

Open link

After reading the Shelby article my immediate reaction was what a load of BS. Months after she tested positive and lost her appeal we know she was at altitude training with the Bowerman team. It was only recently that her name was taken off the Bowrman team website. Now this article comes out saying how she has been cut off from everyone, cut off from funds, is paying for coaching, assume paying for healthcare and all the other basic life expenses.

We were supposed to read this and feel so sorry for poor Shelby. What I get this is all a PR scam.

So Shelby broke the rules. She has exhausted all appeals. Her plane is to continue training and running time trials (ok nothing different than what Bowerman does anyway), the entire team draining her savings, making pickles and dimes working delivering food.

Shelby you broke the rules. The dream is over. Get a job and get on with your life

Assumptions are not always correct. Jeff Manning is very very different than Ken Goe, who wrote PR for Salazar for years. Manning is one of the most prominent investigative journalists in the country.

When you have investigatory journalists in defense of someone convicted of a doping offense, it is worth questioning the judgement made by the governing body.

It is also worth noting that David Epstein, who helped launch the whole investigation into Salazar/Rupp and the NOP, also does not believe that Shelby Houlihan cheated.

CAS never said your first sentence.

I think an open, free-speech forum such as Letsrun is vital to discussion and debate. We need it.

When you see people sharing things like this six weeks ago, such as I did here, and then being crucified for saying it in the first place, it calls a lot of the conversation on these message boards into question - and calls a lot of people’s motives in crucifying Shelby and jumping to the same hasty conclusions as CAS/AIU into question as well.

If AIU believed in a fair and honest sport, they would have taken the defense’s arguments more seriously. Some of the most prominent food scientists in the country came to Shelby’s defense and CAS refused to hear any of it. These are flaws in the AIU/CAS system that merit discussion.

When David Epstein, a journalist who has been committed to investigatory journalism and catching cheaters, thinks that Shelby didn’t cheat, this merits discussion as well.

Letsrun, and it’s message boards, can be an advocate for changing the sport so that clean athletes are banned - in the same way that they advocated for Salazar being banned from the sport for legitimate rule breaking. Why do we continue to crucify the innocent? Why can we not believe that Shelby may not have cheated? What is it in us that keeps us from even having the imagination that she may not have cheated?

These boards were made to help runners, not to harm them, yet they often function in a way that causes more harm than discussion and debate. They should absolutely exist, but the way that people have crucified Shelby on these boards, without any context for her story has opened my eyes to the hypocrisy of Letsrun posters. Why do we want to believe that people doped? Why are we fixated on believing this?

When it comes to discussing doping, I think this forum does much more harm to the sport than good.

I’ve certainly been very critical of letsrun over the years, but I think doped athletes have done far more harm to this sport than this forum.

I agree with both of these posts. Dopers have done more damage than the message boards have on the whole.

Salazar and Rupp’s unwillingness to be forthcoming really damaged people’s perceptions within the inner circle of our sport. It created cynicism in running fans, particularly in America, but that is no reason that we should lose the imagination that an athlete like Shelby Houlihan may have not doped and may actually be a person of high integrity.

I guess the question is where we draw the line, in terms of message boards. If we are truly open to honest discussion and debate we can’t keep crucifying Shelby. We need to leave a possibility open that WADA/AIU/CAS were wrong in their judgements. I realize that this is not the zeitgeist of Letsrun boards, and is in large part the fault of legitimate dopers across our sport, but we need to leave an open space for Shelby’s innocence - especially when the people who have continually been advocates of a clean sport, like Epstein and Tygart, support Shelby.

The message boards should be a place of honest and open discussion, not continued crucifixion.

We still haven't seen what Tygart actually said. In any case, it's worth noting that he has a bone to pick with AIU after they openly condemned USADA's habit of giving athletes courtesy calls in the Coleman case and with CAS after they openly scolded USADA's handling of the evidence in the Salazar case.

As for Epstein, he said back in June 2021 before the full CAS verdict came out and destroyed Houlihan's burrito story:

It is a common contaminant. Nandrolone makes up most of the positive tests that the Athletics Integrity Unit finds overall. We know it gets injected into meat illegally versus the chance that she was for some reason taking it orally, which would be very rare and the stupidest thing you could possibly take. So I’m sort of stuck between these improbable stories. But my reflex these days when someone test positive for nandrolone is to think that that may be accidental because it’s like the one substance that everyone knows not to take on purpose anymore. But it’s still a common contaminant.

Even then, he didn't say that Houlihan was innocent. And he didn't consider the possibility that she took the good old testo cream which sometimes is contaminated with nandro. Plus, his statement that nandro "gets injected into meat illegally" wasn't even tried by her team...

Did he say anything after seeing the full CAS report?

I strongly disagree. And you need to add World Athletics and The Swiss Federal Supreme Court to your list. That makes it 5 : 0 among the institutions in charge. And the two independent scientists consulted by Runner's World and Letsrun also didn't buy the ridiculous burrito excuse.

Last, it should be noted that Tygart has not publicly spoken out on this case in over a year of this ongoing discussion. Sometimes silence speaks volumes.

What truth are we supposed to believe? That she doesn't know how the nando got in her system? Even if she is telling the truth and doesn't know, she still gets a ban because she has to give a plausible reason for it and was unable to. For your traffic light metaphor to have any credence, you have to believe that the lab inaccurately detected elevated levels of nando in her system. No one of note appears to be suggesting this, not even the Shelby camp.

All this does is make me happy it was an agency that holds people accountable instead of USADA that just sweeps it under the rug and away from public scrutiny.

Are you willing to have imagination that Shelby Houlihan did not dope, even if the institutions all unanimously purport that she did?

Our government institutions unanimously purported that the Covid vaccine was safe and effective. Time and experience over the last 18 months would tell us that our governing institutions who made such blanket judgements were not correct in purporting that the Covid vaccines were/are safe or effective.