I'm glad to see some real analysis by someone with credentials contributing to the site. You can disagree with Tucker, but you know that he speaks from a position of knowledge and experience, unlike Twoggle, who was the main LRC source for Shelby's defense.
I've always believed that Houlihan is guilty but I now wonder whether she is guilty by intent, or guilty by virtue of making a dumb mistake. One theory I think is plausible is that she bought DHEA as a recovery supplement. She was obviously involved in the lifting world to some degree, just look at her change in muscle tone in recent years. When you go down that rabbit hole, looking on forums for recommendations then these supplements will come up. And if you can buy them over the counter, then you might think they're not illegal. She then has the problem that even if she bought this supplement, apparently, her coaches had no idea what nandrolone was so didn't know it was a banned substance. So even her coaches couldn't have stepped in to stop her taking it.
That wouldn't excuse her, she still doped, but the defense would be stupidity rather than malice.
Even this is disingenuous framing though. a DHEA supplement that generates a carbon isotope signature over the limit is, by definition, doping. And there's zero chance a runner with BTC "accidentally" buys a recovery supplement that would produce a positive test that's consistent enough in the doping world that testers have established a pattern of their consumption.
Once again the Letsrun drug cheat apologists are back at it. And once again, they are shown to be fools - Gault, Wejo, Rojo. Just sad
Have they ever done this for a nonwhite or non nike BTC athlete? for ANY other athlete convicted of doping. It's been a year, but they are still banging the "she could be innocent" drum.
LET IT GO, it makes you look bad.
I would like to know who really paid Tucker. Was it funnled via 'ads" or what.
Once again the Letsrun drug cheat apologists are back at it. And once again, they are shown to be fools - Gault, Wejo, Rojo. Just sad
Have they ever done this for a nonwhite or non nike BTC athlete? for ANY other athlete convicted of doping. It's been a year, but they are still banging the "she could be innocent" drum.
LET IT GO, it makes you look bad.
I would like to know who really paid Tucker. Was it funnled via 'ads" or what.
I think this "question" has your answer in it:
Hundreds of athletes throughout the world, including many Kenyan distance runners, have been banned for nandrolone positives, so nandrolone positives actually look to be pretty common in distance running. Do you feel comfortable with an athlete like Shelby being banned for four years for the amount of nandrolone found in her system with the isotope profile it had?
You may not understand that this line of questioning is heavily slanted and leading to elicit answers that would be beneficial to Shelby. It's also representative of LRC's coverage of this case.
Yes. They tried leading the witness (expert). But that didn't help much in this open-and-shut case.
If Shelby wanted to go full transparency, she would release her credit card and debit card spending histories for the previous year prior to her positive test. Did she buy nandrolone precursors at Amazon or anywhere else? Sharing spending histories could answer that.
Do you seriously believe any coach, in any discipline, coaching Olympic hopefuls is unaware of Nandralone or anabolic steroids? Come on, give me a break!
Haha! No, of course not! Just parroting back Jerry and Shalane's ridiculous claim
My head hurts after reading. After all of this, she is either lying or telling the truth. Is she that big of a psychopath that she began to believe her own lies along the lines of a Lance Armstrong? Are Jerry, and Shalane complicit in this lie? Or, as mentioned in the article like the Dumb and Dumber quote, you’re saying there’s a chance, that she is innocent. Guess we will never know for sure.
Ross isn't saying that Ayotte didn't perjure herself. I think you misread what he wrote. He is saying the best case (for Ayotte) is that she made an inaccurate generalization. It's still possible she did perjure herself. I honestly have no idea.
He explicitly called it "error", not lie, let alone perjury. Also CAS never called it lie, let alone perjury.
"It's still possible she did perjure herself" - as you just wrote - is a far cry from calling her a "known perjurer" as you did earlier. At least you are now, ever so slowly, stepping back from your original claim.
Only one of the 3 deleted posts deleted had anything of substance to it. I'll address it now.
No, my post directly pointed out that despite the assuredness of Tucker's summary (because - shocker - I did read it before commenting), all your follow-up questions were of the apologetic "yeah, but are you really sure?" variety. You've been accused since day 1 of carrying water for Shelby's efforts to cast doubt on the whole process, and each of these questions does the same - even though you already had Tucker's definitive sdummary in hand,.
You may not understand that this line of questioning is heavily slanted and leading to elicit answers that would be beneficial to Shelby. It's also representative of LRC's coverage of this case. But these are all the questions in that Q& A, cut and pasted.
Did CAS Get It Right? Do you ever read CAS decisions and think “100% that person was doping?” Is this one of those cases? Is there any chance Shelby is an innocent victim in this? is there any reason for them not to conduct this study? Could Houlihan hire a lab to conduct it herself? What is the downside in having more data? Why did Ayotte (and, seemingly, Houlihan’s team) totally ignore this? Isn’t it possible Houlihan could have consumed an organ like that and produced a much higher level? In the sports science community, is a three-person study enough to accept the finding as accurate? Or could/should Houlihan’s team have argued this is far too small a sample size from which to draw a meaningful conclusion? Ayotte was not only the director of the lab that analyzed Houlihan’s sample, but she was also AIU’s expert witness in Houlihan’s CAS appeal. Does this strike you as problematic? Should she still be allowed to testify in a case like this? How big of a mistake did Ayotte make in the Lawson case? Are you surprised Houlihan’s team didn’t push back on this or find an expert to discuss potential disruptions to the US pork supply chain, particularly during the COVID year of 2020? Do you feel comfortable with an athlete like Shelby being banned for four years for the amount of nandrolone found in her system with the isotope profile it had? From your understanding of the science is there any way it is food contamination? If Houlihan wants to compete in the next four years, she almost needs to put on a public service campaign and show the science in the decision was flawed. Did anything stand out as flawed? Do you think the sentence should be reduced to 3 years so that she can compete at Paris 2024? If Shelby Houlihan came to you and said I want to prove my innocence, what would you suggest she do? You’ve spent the last month studying this case in-depth. Gut feeling: is Houlihan innocent or guilty?
There are no questions about how definitive the evidence against her was, or the importance of dispelling false claims of evidence, or whether Shelby and her team are wasting valuable time, or whether, in such a clear-cut case, she should be allowed to contnue training with the team. They're entirely about whether Shelby's defense was good enough, could they have done better, and does she still have a chance to win, either in court, or the court of public opinion.
Don't delete posts just because they hurt your feelings - especially if they're true. (waits for this one to get deleted too...)
Ouch. Seeing the questions lists like that should make for painful reading for any journalist interested in approaching an issue with impartial curiosity. It's just a succession of questions aimed at finding the tiniest straw to clutch at. One or two questions along those lines would be fine, but it's basically every question asking if there's any chance she's not guilty. I'm glad Tucker is an experienced expert witness so he can unequivocally disabuse anyone of any notions that there's anything of substance for Houlihan to hang her case on.
The only intellectually honest position you can come to based on the evidence is that Houlihan is guilty. Now, if Jerry has some persuasive argument that could convince people otherwise (like the one Rojo said swayed John Kellogg in this week's pod), then why aren't they out there making that argument? It makes no sense.
What's really funny is that in another thread a while ago, Wejo said that they'd commissioned Tucker to write this article and that it was more complex than we thought, implying that there was some room for equivocation in his conclusion. It turns out that the case is exactly what most people thought it was and Tucker's conclusion is absolutely firm.
No idea why there's so much criticism of the questions they've asked. They have pretty explicitly gone down every single apologist line and gotten an expert to refute them all.
No idea why there's so much criticism of the questions they've asked. They have pretty explicitly gone down every single apologist line and gotten an expert to refute them all.
I read the entire story and I'm more confused than before. Why didn't they just go to the food truck and find out where they got their pork? It sounds like when her supplements came back negative, she had no other option than to mount this crazy excuse of tainted pork.
I know this has been brought up before: But isn't it a little suspicious that she raced so infrequently?
I'm never one to believe racist motivation without proof. But if this was Sifan Hassan, there is no way this website would be going out of it's way to exonerate her. So her 4 year ban means missing 2 olympics. That means she should only get a 3 year ban? And you claim you want to leave the sport in a better place than it is now? I don't see how letting a known drug cheat back in is doing that.
No idea why there's so much criticism of the questions they've asked. They have pretty explicitly gone down every single apologist line and gotten an expert to refute them all.
Let's play along and pretend they were just asking these questions to get answers to apologists' questions.*
Is the best use of resources, in the biggest doping case to hit T&F in the last few years, when you have access to a pre-eminent sport scientist who specializes in doping, to ask him FOURTEEN questions that imply she's innocent, just to get his reaction?
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