That is about the extent of what is known -- the rest was presumed. Unfortunately we don't know the most important thing -- the source of the banned PED.
It is an irrelevant question. It doesn't f*cking matter where it came from, since it was in her body and she was unable to show legitimate cause.
It's the most relevant question -- too important to be settled by a presumption.
Wow! She is quite the character. Curious to hear more about points 1 and 6 if you feel like it.
You may have noticed that Brad Johnson found nandrolone in a pork kidney just by having his grad student drive around 8 US cities purchasing meat and transporting them with dry ice. I doubt it was 10,000 samples, and this was after the pandemic.
Unfortunately I don't think WADA and AIU really want to catch the big dopers because it's bad for sports business. The biological passport has a major flaw exposed in the Bejder 2016 paper that could easily be fixed by swapping primary and secondary biomarkers, and the Cox 2021 paper proposed a major improvement that isn't being used because it's too good. It's a buzz-kill "party's over" level of improvement. 🙁 And no testing for 2 HIF stabilizers, weak testing for a 3rd, and no procedures or decision limits for AICAR-related testing despite advanced research. 🤷♂️
I saw more information on Bradley Johnson’s research related residues in retail meat (pork, beef, chicken). In general, the research tells us there is no *widespread* contamination of the retail (non-restaurant) meat market inthe U.S. It is too small to tell us anything about the frequency of outliers. A good start, though.
For the pork, there were 45 samples of pork meat, 1 sample of pork kidney and 1 sample of pork liver. The one kidney sample was found to contain estradiol and nandrolone, indicating likelihood of an uncastrated boar.
While this could indicate a much higher percentage of uncastrated boar on the market, it is of note that the nandrolone levels found were low. They didn’t test for 19-Norandrostenedione (commonly found in boar) which would have been helpful since it can cause an increase in urinary 19-NA (leading to a positive test).
So, I’m not sure this study tells us much about the Houlihan case other uncastrated boar may be much more common than we thought, but the nandrolone levels in many/most cases may not be high enough to cause *widespread* contamination problems.
That's not quite accurate. She still hasn't ruled out blaming pork in a burrito, but acknowledges it sounds "ridiculous". All her comments say she still doesn't know:
"It’s not easy to provide answers when you don’t really have them." "So to answer your question, I don’t really know." "maybe it was a vitamin" "Is it possible that [the nandrolone] was in one of the gummy vitamins? I don’t know. It feels unlikely, but like who knows?" "maybe birth control or something" "what if it was the birth control and we didn’t have time to explore that?"
They tried to find sources but only ran into dead-ends they couldn't prove: "where the animals were slaughtered could be almost anywhere". "It now seems nearly impossible that we would be able to track down whether the burrito contained meat from an intact pig." At the end of the first week, they sent vitamins to be tested, but no longer had the same batch. "two of the gummy vitamins I didn’t have the originals of" "We did our best to try to get everything that I did consume and send it off to a lab, but the results obviously were negative." Similarly, they purchased burritos in January to have them tested. "since the burritos purchased in January were from an entirely different shipment of meat, it unfortunately did not tell us anything about whether the meat I ate in December contained nandrolone." When one or two months pass, all the evidence gets consumed or discarded or destroyed.
The only way to understand the CAS findings are, that maybe it was from a greasy burrito, but the CAS found she didn't prove it as "more likely than not" with "specific and concrete" evidence -- that was the basis the CAS used for deeming presumed intent, and sanctioning the presence as if it were intentional.
I saw more information on Bradley Johnson’s research related residues in retail meat (pork, beef, chicken). In general, the research tells us there is no *widespread* contamination of the retail (non-restaurant) meat market inthe U.S. It is too small to tell us anything about the frequency of outliers. A good start, though.
For the pork, there were 45 samples of pork meat, 1 sample of pork kidney and 1 sample of pork liver. The one kidney sample was found to contain estradiol and nandrolone, indicating likelihood of an uncastrated boar.
While this could indicate a much higher percentage of uncastrated boar on the market, it is of note that the nandrolone levels found were low. They didn’t test for 19-Norandrostenedione (commonly found in boar) which would have been helpful since it can cause an increase in urinary 19-NA (leading to a positive test).
So, I’m not sure this study tells us much about the Houlihan case other uncastrated boar may be much more common than we thought, but the nandrolone levels in many/most cases may not be high enough to cause *widespread* contamination problems.
One out of one kidneys testing positive should certainly raise doubts about assumed opinion estimates of "far less than 1 in 10,000". This also relies on an assumption that the boar could only be cryptorchid, despite chemical and immuno castration existing for decades, as far back as the '90s and '80s. These have temporary effects and would certainly become relevant with a few weeks or months delay in slaughter, e.g. during nationwide supply chain disruptions caused by a pandemic.
The only way to understand the CAS findings are, that maybe it was from a greasy burrito, but the CAS found she didn't prove it as "more likely than not" with "specific and concrete" evidence -- that was the basis the CAS used for deeming presumed intent, and sanctioning the presence as if it were intentional.
Correct. All the absurd stories and coincidences that the best defense team in the world of doping concocted to try to explain Foolagain's doping, all the "evidence", basically presented to the court of popular opinion--as to the uninquiring brain seemed plausible-- was found to be as likely as winning the lottery without buying a ticket. Even the likelihood of an elite endurance athlete eating more than one bite of this alleged greasy beef-turned-wild-boar-testicle burrito (just look at the photos of the emaciated body, my god) is one-in-a-million.
Almost. You still need to factor in the size difference (300 - 400 g versus 2/3 of 140 g) and excretion profile: ...
You conveniently left out that the 130ng/ml measurement was 8-1/2 hours after ingestion. ...
Speaking of needing to factor in "excretion profile", we should also consider that the women with 130 ng/ml had peed 5 times within that 8 1/2 hours, excreting 20, 10, 40, 60, then 130 ng/ml, excreting a total of 19000 ng in 24 hours (compared to 560-880 ng for meat). One man had excreted a total of 31,740 ng in 24 hours while another just 11,140 ng/ml -- this shows quite a lot of variation just among this small sample size of three who ate the same meal.
We should consider what her "excretion profile" would look like had the volunteer waited 10 hours for the first pee. Maybe Houlihan could have avoided the whole incident had she woken up an hour before the testers arrived, and voided her bladder of all the nandrolone buildup.
(She could also have been cleared, had she simply eaten more soy, and less corn, depleting the carbon istopes in her ERCs.)
Correct. All the absurd stories and coincidences that the best defense team in the world of doping concocted to try to explain Foolagain's doping, all the "evidence", basically presented to the court of popular opinion--as to the uninquiring brain seemed plausible-- was found to be as likely as winning the lottery without buying a ticket. Even the likelihood of an elite endurance athlete eating more than one bite of this alleged greasy beef-turned-wild-boar-testicle burrito (just look at the photos of the emaciated body, my god) is one-in-a-million.
I'm not a sheep who uninquiringly follows "popular opinion", nor am I persuaded by what you believe is "plausible". Decades of "WADA science", and WADA's own techinal guidelines, show us consuming nandrolone from pork is "plausible".
Houlihan's defense team was required to argue based on "specific and concrete elements", and was judged by that standard. All this talk about likelihoods across the USA was neither specific to Houlihan, nor concrete. The "expert witnesses" were permitted to merely "suggest" an "exogenous with a pseudo-endogenous signature" alternative available at Amazon, without "specific and concrete elements", and without estimating likelihoods, satisfying no legal or scientific standard.
This post was edited 42 seconds after it was posted.
Correct. All the absurd stories and coincidences that the best defense team in the world of doping concocted to try to explain Foolagain's doping, all the "evidence", basically presented to the court of popular opinion--as to the uninquiring brain seemed plausible-- was found to be as likely as winning the lottery without buying a ticket. Even the likelihood of an elite endurance athlete eating more than one bite of this alleged greasy beef-turned-wild-boar-testicle burrito (just look at the photos of the emaciated body, my god) is one-in-a-million.
I'm not a sheep who uninquiringly follows "popular opinion", nor am I persuaded by what you believe is "plausible". Decades of "WADA science", and WADA's own techinal guidelines, show us consuming nandrolone from pork is "plausible".
Houlihan's defense team was required to argue based on "specific and concrete elements", and was judged by that standard. All this talk about likelihoods across the USA was neither specific to Houlihan, nor concrete. The "expert witnesses" were permitted to merely "suggest" an "exogenous with a pseudo-endogenous signature" alternative available at Amazon, without "specific and concrete elements", and without estimating likelihoods, satisfying no legal or scientific standard.
You continue to site single plausible items, but for all these (ridiculous) single items to line up is incredibly, unceasingly, increasingly, absurdly, embarrassingly, and insultingly implausible. Scientifically and Practicality Impossible.
You continue to site single plausible items, but for all these (ridiculous) single items to line up is incredibly, unceasingly, increasingly, absurdly, embarrassingly, and insultingly implausible. Scientifically and Practicality Impossible.
And Absurd
Site? Practicality?
I know in the popular court, many believe it would be "scientifically and practicality (sic)" impossible, but I am wholly unpersuaded by a general argument which is neither "specific" nor "concrete" to the case of Houlihan. While the general likelihood across a nation will inarguably be low, the specific individual likelihoods will vary greatly, especially for non-randomly chosen cases pre-selected on the basis of the presence of a low amount of nandolone, under unique anormal conditions during supply chain issues in the middle of a world-wide pandemic.
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