SHELBY HOULIHAN SPEAKS! Issues statement, does RW Q&A & 90min podcast explaining her side.

round and round wrote:

Salvitore Stitchmo wrote:

A few thoughts immediately come to mind

1) Who in the hell is advising this woman on what to say and what not to say here? "I don't know if someone gave me something I didn't know about", "What if it was a vitamin and I'm still taking it" "Yeah the burrito thing as ridiculous as it honestly sounds, it feels like it makes the most sense" - are you kidding me? Are you really f-ing kidding me here. This is like an 8 year old child trying to navigate something their parents know they did and they know their parents know they did it. She went to college? Really? My god.

2) If anyone still believes and supports her they are just as moronic as she is. And yeah this is a message board where we can all say things with very little consequence and never be held accountable to, but I would say that to anyones face. If you support her you support doping in sport and you are an idiot.

3) Zero doubt she knew exactly what she was doing. She did nandrolone precursors which are easily available and her mental gymnastic was "well it's not directly nandrolone, so......" Again, the mark of a complete moron and no surprise she didn't know how to manage it and not get caught like some of her bed-buddies, uh I mean teammates, uh yeah....., were able to.

4) If Jerry Schumacher is still supporting her he is just as bad. Same with Flanagan. The best and right thing they could do is make public statements saying that unfortunately as new information is coming to light it is apparent what they believed was not the case and they were wrong. Yeah we know they needed to support her initially and that wasn't the wrong thing. But now it's time to say "we were wrong and we were fooled too". By not doing this they bring the whole BTC into disrepute - all of the athletes in that group should have that cloud over them fairly or not. So he in particular needs to grow a pair and do the right thing.

What a joke this whole thing is. People that can't see things right in front of their very eyes - completely mindf---ed by emotion and what they want to believe vs rational thought and common sense.

Well-thought out. Thank you.

Thisisthereason wrote:

round and round wrote:

Well-thought out. Thank you.

Agreed, well thought out thanks. I think another "tell" is that her story has now changed, she swore up and down initially that it was the burrito (remember that tearful video?), because she didn't fool anyone with that lie, she is changing the story again to sway public opinion. Classic thing liars do. Shifting goal posts and such.

Also, to your talking point #4, I bet you she has a deal with BTC that if they stick by her, she will not drag them all down with what she knows about the program and all the other athletes. THAT's why they have such loyalty to her. They don't really care about her, they care about themselves (most elite runners are pretty self-centered, it just goes with the sport), and yeah, as soon as they turn on her (coaches or athletes) she'll do a tell-all about all the dirty doping/shenanigans the program has been up to. For sure.

Thisisthereason wrote:

round and round wrote:

Well-thought out. Thank you.

Agreed, well thought out thanks. I think another "tell" is that her story has now changed, she swore up and down initially that it was the burrito (remember that tearful video?), because she didn't fool anyone with that lie, she is changing the story again to sway public opinion. Classic thing liars do. Shifting goal posts and such.

Also, to your talking point #4, I bet you she has a deal with BTC that if they stick by her, she will not drag them all down with what she knows about the program and all the other athletes. THAT's why they have such loyalty to her. They don't really care about her, they care about themselves (most elite runners are pretty self-centered, it just goes with the sport), and yeah, as soon as they turn on her (coaches or athletes) she'll do a tell-all about all the dirty doping/shenanigans the program has been up to. For sure.

jcaban wrote:

The more Shelby speaks the angrier I get. She is acting as if it's the anti-doping authorities' job to figure out how nandrolone got in her system. "I thought, once they start investigating, digging, and trying to figure out the truth, they would obviously see that I'm innocent." No, hun. That's not how the system works. YOU tested positive for a PED, and not by a little bit. You tested way over the threshold. If you were not intentionally doping, then it's YOUR job to show how the nandrolone got into your system. You tried, and you couldn't. "We shipped all of my vitamins and all of the different meats offered at that food truck to a lab to be tested. None of those tests gave us the answers we were hoping for." (Ambiguous phrasing, btw. Why doesn't she just say that they all tested clean?)

She's claiming that the nandrolone came from pork, yet she could not produce any pork sample from that food truck or elsewhere that had detectable levels of nandrolone in it. She also admitted that she did not have all the same batches of the vitamins that she took at the time of the positive result, so it seems just as likely that the nandrolone could come from those. (Also, for what's it's worth, she said in the RW piece that she only takes "a calcium gummy vitamin, a multivitamin gummy vitamin, a vitamin D gummy vitamin, and a B complex vitamin and iron at altitude." So she doesn't use any protein powder, collagen, or hydration products like the other pros use? Seems strange...)

Bottom line: she tested way over the limit in both her A and B samples and can't provide any evidence as to how the nandrolone got into her system. So, she's banned. It's really very simple, and it's infuriating that she's blaming the doping authorities for doing their job when in fact the onus is on HER to provide evidence as to how the nandrolone got into her system or else serve the ban as if she doped intentionally.

Salvitore Stitchmo wrote:

Thisisthereason wrote:

Agreed, well thought out thanks. I think another "tell" is that her story has now changed, she swore up and down initially that it was the burrito (remember that tearful video?), because she didn't fool anyone with that lie, she is changing the story again to sway public opinion. Classic thing liars do. Shifting goal posts and such.

Also, to your talking point #4, I bet you she has a deal with BTC that if they stick by her, she will not drag them all down with what she knows about the program and all the other athletes. THAT's why they have such loyalty to her. They don't really care about her, they care about themselves (most elite runners are pretty self-centered, it just goes with the sport), and yeah, as soon as they turn on her (coaches or athletes) she'll do a tell-all about all the dirty doping/shenanigans the program has been up to. For sure.

That's what I mean. You went to such lengths to concoct this story that relied not just on one infinitesimally small probability but like 6 or 7 of them, all reliant on each other and then within a few weeks of your final lifeline being snuffed out you come back with "well now it could be the vitamins"?! "Even though my story sounded implausible it was the best implausible story I had at the time"?! I mean you can't be serious right. Jesus, love him or hate him you have to at least respect how Lance never ever sold out on his story right until the bitter end, and that was mostly because he had to or else go to jail. The best piece of advice anyone could have given her was to "Shut. The. F--k. Up." because there were a group of flat-earthers out there who believed in the 0.000000001 possibility that she ate the wrong burrito which just happened to have hormones in it that spiked her nandrolone levels due to her menstrual cycle which sadly coincided with the first drug test she had had in 9 months because of a global health crisis. But now? As I said before if anyone still believes her they need some kind of medication.

Back to Jerry and BTC? Possibly. Could be a lesser of two evils situation - this is plausible. I am more inclined to believe that it's just a case of Schumacher being a classically insecure white American middle-aged male who can't just admit he's wrong and say sorry. I mean this is the same twit that said he had quote "never head of it" when referencing nandrolone - one of the most well known performance enhancing drugs in the history of the sport of track and field. Real shame for guys like Fisher, Kincaid etc who I want to believe aren't mixed up in "performance enhancing drug precursor supplements" but who would really ever know these days?

Tittybutihszc wrote:

jcaban wrote:

The more Shelby speaks the angrier I get. She is acting as if it's the anti-doping authorities' job to figure out how nandrolone got in her system. "I thought, once they start investigating, digging, and trying to figure out the truth, they would obviously see that I'm innocent." No, hun. That's not how the system works. YOU tested positive for a PED, and not by a little bit. You tested way over the threshold. If you were not intentionally doping, then it's YOUR job to show how the nandrolone got into your system. You tried, and you couldn't. "We shipped all of my vitamins and all of the different meats offered at that food truck to a lab to be tested. None of those tests gave us the answers we were hoping for." (Ambiguous phrasing, btw. Why doesn't she just say that they all tested clean?)

She's claiming that the nandrolone came from pork, yet she could not produce any pork sample from that food truck or elsewhere that had detectable levels of nandrolone in it. She also admitted that she did not have all the same batches of the vitamins that she took at the time of the positive result, so it seems just as likely that the nandrolone could come from those. (Also, for what's it's worth, she said in the RW piece that she only takes "a calcium gummy vitamin, a multivitamin gummy vitamin, a vitamin D gummy vitamin, and a B complex vitamin and iron at altitude." So she doesn't use any protein powder, collagen, or hydration products like the other pros use? Seems strange...)

Bottom line: she tested way over the limit in both her A and B samples and can't provide any evidence as to how the nandrolone got into her system. So, she's banned. It's really very simple, and it's infuriating that she's blaming the doping authorities for doing their job when in fact the onus is on HER to provide evidence as to how the nandrolone got into her system or else serve the ban as if she doped intentionally.

The point is that the rules are wrong and the flipped burden of proof provides only the narrowest of corridors to prove innocence.

This is unlike any other types of justice we are used to even in low level strict liability cases.

And where else in any justice system is it stated that the lab results are deemed to be correct at the outset of the trial and do not have to be proved.

And then Ayotte turns up as an expert opinion to say how wonderful her lab results are and uses unpublished research from her colleagues to say how wonderful she is.