New Shelby houlihan article out in WSJ. Big respect again to gds

Civil standards are more lenient than criminal standards, and surely decisions that only meet the standard of "probably" or "probably not" are not the best methods to arrive at certain truths. Here I'm talking more about arbitrations under the WADA Code, and its ability to support some of the conclusions that many fans here make, that go beyond what the CAS decided.

I don't ignore that Shelby had a chance to rebut the presumptions to this "lower standard", but have said repeatedly that "Such proof (how the substance entered the body) is difficult to provide." This is a quote from Judge Jean-Paul Costa, giving WADA feedback on the changes to the WADA Code 2015, which the CAS tells us about in paragraph 90. Success for the innocent athlete is not guaranteed, and both WADA and the CAS know this. When the athlete is put on notice 1-month after the sample collection, I expect that most innocent athletes would be unable to meet this burden based on "specific and concrete elements", given the amount of investigation, testing and evidence that needs to be conducted and collected.

I'm not sure what "you can't have it both ways" means. The WADA Lab and the AIU were not really held to any legal standard, but presumed to have met it. The primary CAS findings of doping and intent did not meet the "standard of probability", but were consequences of presumptions.

More lenient doesn’t mean unfair. Ask any plaintiff or civil litigator (hey, that’s me) how easy it is to win a civil case, even when benefitting from a rebuttable presumption. It is a lie to say these proceedings are not robust. Your claim that these are not the best methods for arriving at the truth are false and countered by millions upon millions of people over of hundreds of years across the entire planet who have engaged in such systems. They are not perfect processes for sure, but humanity has yet to invent a better system. Imperfection does not mean unfair. You really do not know what you are talking about.

Difficult to prove doesn’t mean unfair. Difficult to prove actually demonstrates just how robust the proceedings are.

They absolutely were held to a legal standard and saying otherwise once again demonstrates that you do not understand legal proceedings. Your position is an absolute joke to anyone with legal training. WADA and the AIU demonstrated indisputable evidence that Shelby had a banned substance in her system at a level much higher than the legal limit. So indisputable in fact that Shelby… didn’t dispute it! Saying they were just “presumed to have met it” doesn’t mean they just walked in to court pointing fingers with no other evidence. They had an indisputable positive test. That allowed them to meet the legal standard. That is a fair system.

Every complaint you have about the process comes from the fact that you don’t understand legal proceedings. I’m not being facetious either. Your ignorance really is astounding on this for a guy who is so passionate about this issue. You have completely misunderstood what happened with the CAS process. But you’re just about finding the truth, right?

Dude, what's wrong with you? The claim was stomach offal, based on the receipt of the food truck owner. It's not me who thinks they were wrong, sneaky or whatever. This is all you, now claiming that they "seem to have responded to the best of their ability" - so you are saying they forgot that they also added kidney but tried to be truthful? I say they were truthful as independent witness (until proven otherwise), neither forgetful nor sneaky. Of course no evidence from you, no surprise there. You also ignored again that the analysis of the offal did not show kidney or testicles...

And chorizo? Where is that coming from all of sudden? The claim was offal, based on stomach, as proven by the receipt. Not chorizo.

Finally of course, feeding the pigs more soy only once before their death won't change their nandrolone's CIR. At all. Biochem 101. Likewise, feeding them more soy all throughout April but not May will lead to normal CIR in June. Biochem 101. And all of that ignores again that you failed to provide any evidence for any period of increased soy feeding. Because you don't have a case, just deflections to spread Nike PR.

If you ever were interested in the truth, you'd have noticed by now that corn became more available and cheaper during the pandemic - reasons to feed more corn, not less.

Your opinions are meaningful only to you. They are simply some of the garbage that doping-deniers post on this site.

You're also a liar. CAS gave Houlihan the opportunity to rebut the presumption of intentional doping but she failed to do so according to the balance of probabilities. The decision was therefore determined by her failure. If she had had any kind of decent defense the Court would have ruled she committed no offence under the Code.

You're right, of course, but he can't afford to see that. His life would lose all meaning if he did.

Again: Tygart also protected/defended guilty gymnastics officials that knew about Nassar's sexual misconduct for years.

Also, wrong receipt. The receipt that matters is for a flvcking beef burrito.

What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you?

I know the explicit communication between Houlihan and the AIU was "pig offal" and "a burrito ... containing pork offal" because both the CAS told me, and Houlihan told me. Yet in this "telephone game", it seems that the "expert witnesses" were "unaware" of the full claim communicated to the AIU. The CAS report did not explain when and how or even if "offal" was reduced to "only meat and stomach", and at what point all other offal was excluded, if at all. Notably, they do not make mention of the PI obtained receipts.

In any case, there was evidence before the CAS of "fat" and "chorizo" -- the "expert witness" rebuttal is incomplete even if we just consider the evidence before the CAS.

I don't assume that the food truck owner, the PI, or the receipts, are exhaustive, and don't assume the reasons for these omissions are nefarious, but could be due to other factors like inexperience, lack of time, lack of receipts, and a lack of ability to find the information. The PI quickly hit a dead end, when he couldn't find the source of the meat beyond the central distributor. I suppose they simply abandoned this line of investigation as an unachievable effort after learning that "the only way to know this was probably to communicate with the meatpacking facility where the meats are cut and packaged" and "where the animals are actually slaughtered can be almost anywhere".

You keep saying nonsense things like "the analysis of the offal did not show kidney or testicles". What analysis? The CAS mentioned no such analysis. Who did this analysis in this case, and where can I find the results of that analysis? I know Prof. Ayotte analyzed offal and published values in a peer-reviewed papers, finding exceptionally high values up to 22-26x Houlihan's "low" results -- in studies with low sample sizes not looking for maximum values.

Chorizo (pork sausage) comes from the CAS report (see 99). The way you talk, it's like maybe you don't really know what "offal" means in Houlihan's claim, and where offal can be found in a pork offal burrito. Offal is a collective term that refers to all edible organs: "the entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food". Some selected organs can be chopped up and mixed in with the greasy pork meat in a burrito, or included in chorizo (pork sausage). Both Profs. McGlone and Ayotte have been very helpful at explaining which are the organs that can be found with higher concentrations nandrolone, but their incomplete rebuttal fails to include these organs by focusing on the low concentration sources meat and stomach.

As evidence, I have Prof. McGlone's concession that soy was increased, and plenty of literature showing that C3 diets (not just soy, but cereals, barley, oats, rice and wheat, alfalfa (lucerne), cotton, Eucalyptus, sunflower, soybeans, sugar beets, potatoes, tobacco, Chlorella, spinach") will produce "dissimilar" delta-delta C13 values -- all referenced and confirmed in WADA's TD.

Curiously you say "you failed to provide any evidence for any period of increased soy feeding". This also applies to Prof. McGlone and to you, and your novel theory about corn availability.

In any case, individual farmer practices across the USA vary widely -- there is no "one size fits all" answer.

But again, I am not trying to prove the nandrolone was in the burrito -- only that this possibility remains viable because it has not been disproved by the WA/AIU and their experts -- there are far too many assumptions and unknowns.

Did you see the case of the tennis player with 135 ng/ml of nandrolone from eating beef?

You may be on to something there.

You seem to be missing the point. It is not civil litigation per se that is unfair, or the civil standard. What is unfair is requiring the innocent athlete to be fully responsible for all things that can happen to them despite their diligence, through no fault or negligence of their own, without their knowledge, AND equating their sanction to that of the guilty intentional cheat. What is also unfair is requiring the accused athlete to initiate a detailed investigation into several foreign domains as an unitiated newbie, like hidden nuances in the pork and supplement industry, and the established pork and supplement science, and any significant deviations during once-in-a-century pandemic, with a 30-day delayed start, in only a few weeks time, without any subpeona power, in order to collect a critical mass of "concrete and specific elements", in order to meet this "low" civil standard. Note that many athletes, even in rich countries, are poor, and may not be able to afford the 5-figures for scientific and legal and investigative experts, especially while provisionally suspended with their primary income stream cut-off, and may not have access to the best experts (i.e. scientists and directors working for WADA Labs who are forbidden to speak against other WADA Labs by a Code of Ethics) and then litigate their best effort against a seasoned team, possibly conflicted, studying these questions and litigating these cases for decades, and well known to the small pool of CAS arbitors from previous litigations.

The unfairness comes from policies and presumptions in the Code.

One point to note is that this case is not civil litigation in a civil court and athletes are not accused of violating civil laws. This is a dispute over rule interpretations in arbitration, according to a contract the athlete did not and cannot negotiate, that gives anti-doping prosecutors several advantages through favorable presumptions. Understanding the complexities in this case not only requires "legal" background, but also requires scientific and mathematical and problem modeling expertise that civil litigators (hey, that's you) and arbitors may not possess.

The reason your DIU analogy fails is a scientific one: there is a scientifically proven WADA legal way for an athlete to have low amounts of nandrolone in the endogenous range in their urine -- ingestion by pork. There is no such scientifically state legal way for any licensed driver to have an excessive amount of alcohol in their system and drive a vehicle.

Regarding robustness of findings, if the best answer to some question is "more probable than not", this inherently acknowledges some potentially high degree of uncertainty. The difference can be as little as the weight of "a feather on the scale of the balance of probability".

One point that is blurred by all this focus on what civil standards are, versus criminal standards, is:

What exactly are the robust findings that were established by the CAS, and/or the WA/AIU and its "expert witnesses", that met this lower civil standard of "balance of probability"?

Recall the CAS's primary findings are that Houlihan failed to meet this standard, not that the WA/AIU met them.

Specifically, the finding that the AAF was properly reported did not meet that standard. The finding that the ADRV was properly charged did not meet that standard. The deeming of intent did not meet that standard. These were all the consequences of presumptions in the Code, after the findings that Houlihan failed to meet the standard.

You might be tempted to answer all these intermediate findings about the likely contents of the burrito, and what the pig ate, and their age. But this is a failure of problem modelling, and misunderstanding the relevant questions before the CAS. The probability of the "pre-supposed" conditions necessary for an event to occur, is not the same probability that this event explains the test results of one athlete eating one burrito, when compared to alternative explanations, after taking into consideration the specific fact patterns in Houlihan's case.

To illustrate, if you have a million burritos, it may be true that one in a million burritos can produce an adverse result. That is easily determined on the scale of probability. But if you have a million athletes, and only one athlete has produced that same adverse result, the relevant probability for this specific case of that one athlete is not one in a million.

Boohoo! The process is fair. You just didn’t like the outcome. Tough!

One last comment. Shelby was not a diligent athlete. I’ve known athletes going back decades who did not eat out even once during their competitive years. They literally would not put anything in their bodies if they didn’t know where it came from. No eating out. No eating over at friends’ houses. No eating at mom’s house. No eating any food they didn’t prepare themselves. No multi-vitamins even. That’s what diligence looks like. It’s the cost of doing business at the elite level. It’s what clean athletes do to ensure they remain clean. Shelby, on the other hand, is buying food from a taco cart off the street. She was not diligent in the slightest. She is deserving of no sympathy.

Ah, now you are finally admitting why you are trolling so hard about "other" ingredients. You had this completely baseless imagination that the ingredient list was not "exhaustive", but they did their best and were not nefarious. Got it. Therefore the experts were nefarious/corrupt/deceptive/.... because they only discussed the presented ingredient list. Got it.

Of course that ignores that the food truck owner got a heads up from the PI "what we were hoping to get from her" prior to the PI visiting her, and also that neither the PI nor Shelby nor the experienced lawyer ever claimed that the ingredient list was not exhaustive. But you are experienced in ignoring the most important facts.

And then you troll me again with your utter lack of knowledge of this case:

"You keep saying nonsense things like "the analysis of the offal did not show kidney or testicles". What analysis?" The analysis done on behalf of Shelby, naturally. Which other one was there?

And then you are trying to redefine the meaning of "offal". This is of course 100% irrelevant for this case. Relevant is only what pork ingredients, if any, were in the burrito Shelby ate.

"novel theory about corn availability" - is not novel, it's public knowledge. But yes, the expert's "concession" regarding the possibility of temporarily more soy was overly generous and baseless indeed.

You and the rest of our team had over four years to find evidence for any substantial deviations from the corn feeding pattern in summer/fall 2020 and couldn't.

You and the rest of our team had over four years to find evidence for any substantial omissions from the pork ingredient list and couldn't. But sure, blame the experts for not discussing that the pork ingredient list was incomplete. It's not like you have any credibility left to lose.

ha, good try. Not US beef, aaand...

Go back to the pic on page 1 and tell me that emaciated runner would eat any greasy burrito of any kind. There is just no way. I realize when you were a world class athlete you ate ding dongs and hotdogs, but endurance athletes at that level in 2021 do not eat shït food.The only thing that was tainted was her urine with nandro.

Now who is the child? Do they teach you that in law school?

He's talking to someone with an infantile understanding of the issues. The process was fair and applies to all athletes in the sport; your endless whining simply shows you don't like the result. Good.

This seems like a huge personal sacrifice just to be on the right side of ever changing anti-doping regulations that athletes don't negotiate or thoroughly research through to all its implications, as a pre-condition to competing.

Although you are convinced about the diligence of these athletes you know, I still wonder how diligent your athletes were. Could your diligent athletes prove, with specific and concrete evidence, that they exclusively ate foods they prepared themselves, and never ate at their mom's or at their friend's, or ate out, if they had to? Because that is their burden. It's not enough just to be diligent, but you would have to be able to prove it in a "court".

Even preparing food at home requires buying it at a store or market, unless athletes grow their own crops and raise and feed and slaughter the animals themselves. Even then, athlete pig farmers who raise pigs but don't castrate them, while feeding them C3 plants, while they eat C4 plants, can still test "positive" with dissimilar CIR results. Did the athletes you know diligently research everything they bought at the store or market, back to the farms where crops were grown, and animals raised, including all that they ate, or that they were injected with, and obtain the same batch samples from all the labs where additives were manufactured, for all the labelled and non-labelled ingredients, before they ate it? After all "strict liability" means the athlete is responsible for all of that, and must be in a position to be able to prove all of that, when put on notice weeks or months after a "positive" test result. Where do we reasonably draw the line for the expected level of diligence for clean athletes who just want to compete in something they are good at?

Let's not forget that the primary goal of competition in sports for clean athletes is the competition. Runners just want to run, without all this overhead. Clean athletes have a lot on their plate just to be able to train, and avoid injuries, to maximize their fitness and compete at their maximum potential, to also be asked to diligently predict what hoops need to be jumped through to best avoid false convictions, and put themselves in a position to prove it, in a system that doesn't burden the accusers with proving ambiguous test results with known confounders are correctly interpreted as adverse findings or anti-doping rule violations.

And the primary goal of anti-doping is to protect clean athletes, not convict them, or turn them into hermits, or prevent them from eating USDA approved foods, or prevent them from receiving standard medical care for common ailments.

How diligent are athletes expected to be? Most athletes naively think it is enough not to intentionally dope, to avoid being accused of doping.

The lesson learned from Shelby's case is that diligent athletes should preserve samples of all things consumed, in order to be in a better position to prepare their specific and concrete defense and meet their burden of proving their innocence, which will still cost them 5-figures, a lengthy suspension while they prove their innocence, and still be penalized with one strike against them for their bad fortune. Even then, Asinga's case shows us that this still might not be enough, as anything that is opened might be suspected as adulterated by the athlete -- a suspicion that meets no legal standard.

How long should diligent athletes preserve their meals? The current statute of limitation is 10 years. Is it even possible to preserve food for that long, in order for retests to be valid?

I would appreciate some serious tangible responses from a seasoned civil litigator who has personal knoledge of diligent athletes for decades.

Is this kind of personal abuse one of the games they teach in law school, when you are no longer able to discuss on the merits? I guess these kind of childish emotional headgames can be persuasive to those who don't know any better, or have self-doubts and insecurity.

Fairness aside, there are still reasonable doubts about whether she doped in the first place, and/or did so intentionally, as neither of these opinions were established even to the low civil standard of balance of probabilty.

A proportionate response to your nonsense. But my apologies for stopping to your level.