Sports Scientist Ross Tucker breaks downs the Shelby Houlihan case for us

That is flawed logic. We cant say it is wrong because it is shown to not be possible. Just the same way we know the nandrolone doesn't come from a goldfish. We can say that without knowing where she got her doping from. Thats how it works.

The test results, the amounts, the levels and isotopes are not consistent with her explanation, which is what CAS says, what the expert in this interview says. Its strange of you to pretend otherwise. But you will just ignore this reality. Guess all doped runners have to work in a weekly burrito so they allways will have an excuse.

Is it flawed logic? How can you say anything is wrong without first establishing what was right? This was not properly done by the CAS because WADA does not require it. For its limited purpose of deciding an ADRV and the appropriate length of sanction, the CAS was allowed to ignore many things, and presume others.

Contrary to your understanding, all of these things are entirely consistent with her explanations. The CAS did not say anything was "not consistent with her explanation". Neither did the AIU experts, nor did Ross.

Contrary to your suggestion, the burrito would not be a successful excuse, unless the athletes routinely preserve the remaining uneaten portion of their burritos for months for subsequent testing, like the case of Simon Getzmann.

Once again ...

One flaw in the AIU likelihood calculation is, given the positive test result, the probability of her guilt cannot be estimated by counting the pigs who cannot produce the given test result. This only gives you the ratio of "expected positive test results" to "expected negative test results". To properly judge the guilt of Houlihan's positive test result, we should be looking for the ratio of "not intentional ingestion" to "intentional exogenous doping". The AIU, the CAS, and Ross did not do that.

Another probability scenario to think about to show how a large enough number of opportunities makes even the most unlikely events likely. The chance of flipping 13 heads in a row is 1 in 8192 -- roughly the same 1 in 10,000 estimated chance given by Prof McGlone and repeated by Ross. According to Wolfram Alpha, if you flip the coin 13,000 times, the expected length of the longest run of heads is 13.

In the US, 121 million pigs are slaughtered each year, and, accepting the AIU's expert's estimate, up to 12,100 of them are cryptorchid which end up in the food market. This gives a lot of opportunities for some athlete, somewhere to test positive for nandrolone from pork consumption. This is before considering how the pandemic altered the likelihoods and invalidates some of the expert's assumptions or dismissions, by slaughtering more soy-fed pigs beyond 6 months old, and USDA inspectors bypassing the sniff test (during an airborne virus pandemic) that the AIU expert suggests would have filtered out intact boars from the food market.

Lol are you serious? "How can you say whats wrong without saying whats right"? I know my neighbour didnt shoot Kennedy, without knowing who did it. If I buy a burrito now I know the meat isnt from my cat, but I don't know where it is from. If I get caught in doping they know it isn't from the broccoli I had last night, but they dont know the exact source. You logic is highly flawed. So flawed there is no point reasoning with you.

I dont know why you want to pretend this case is more open than it is, but it isnt. Shelby did dope. She didnt eat a burrito that magically was pig intestine without knowing, and that pig intestine didn't give her so high levels. And the carbon isotope isn't even right. Thats the meat of it. Accept reality. Shelby took drugs. Thats highly probable. The other explanations isn't.

If you have any serious reasons, I'd be happy to entertain them. If you can point to one logical flaw, I'm happy to update my logic. Otherwise, it is effectively undisputed.

When you say "this case is more open than it is", the CAS findings and decisions did not include or conclude "Shelby took drugs" with any degree of probability, let alone "highly probable".

We know her "explanation" will produce all these things you say it won't from decades of research, including papers with the AIU-expert Ayotte's name on it, where ingesting uncastrated pork offal produced both the "high levels", and the right "carbon isotope".

All this talk of low probability is counter-acted by the large number of pigs sold each year, creating a lot of opportunities for some unlucky athlete, somewhere, sometime, to test positive from pork consumption, with the carbon isotope determined by the pig's diet. When an athlete eventually does positive for nandrolone, it makes no logical sense to deny that it could ever happen just because it is statistically unlikely.

I can accept the AIU argument that across the nation, negative results from burrito consumption will significantly outnumber positive results, and I can accept the CAS decision that Houlihan's team did not establish the source of the nandrolone, and consequently could not establish "not intentional".

But any suggestion that "Shelby took drugs", is not reasonably supported by any substantial evidence, specific to Shelby, inside or outside of the CAS report. If you want to make that claim, you have some more homework to do.

We better notify WADA and CAS that the case needs an entire do-over. 2 Message Board Warriors on LRC have doubts, enhanced by a lack of logic and an inability to understand facts.

I already pointed out logical flaws and you ignored it.

Shelby doping is much more probable than her ordering beef, getting pig for some reason, eating large amounts of that pig without noticing the difference betwen this and beef, that pig being contaminated by nandrolone, that nandrolone getting to high enough levels, and having the right isotope. And everything happening just the right time before a doping test. All that is so unlikely that you might as well say it is impossible, but there is a slim chance. It is not 0. Just as close to 0 you get. If you want to believe one in a thrillion events be my guest, but I think its better to face reality. Shelby is a convicted doper.

This post currently stands at 80 upvotes and 0 downvotes, and Shelburito's post you are quoting at 75 : 3, despite letsrun's pro Shelby propaganda. Well said!

Time to move on from this case; don't feed the trolls.

Dude, you see red skies, instead of blue ones. You are so in the tank for white runners, you will contort yourself embarrassingly to carry forward your nonsense.

White runners?

The AIU argument falls apart completely when reconsidering the 50 nandrolone positives (38% of all positives) since 2004 in Kenya, a country with no USDA inspectors sniffing boar carcasses and with farmers who do not routinely castrate their pigs.

You did say there were logical flaws but failed to point out anything specific, and then created some analogies that have nothing to do with my posts. There is no way for me to adapt my thinking based on your analogies of Kennedy, your cat, or brocolli.

The CAS report didn't estimate the probability of Shelby taking drugs, so any suggestion that that probability is higher doesn't come from the CAS, nor the AIU, nor Ross -- only from anonymous posters with no special knowledge.

Your "just as close to 0" is not the measure of the probabilty of Shelby's drug taking, but a measure of how many pork eaters would test positive. This small "close to 0" measure is confirmed by the fact that not many US runners are busted for nandrolone.

Again -- if you see something that is not logical, or something counter-factual, please be specific and I will entertain it.

I can't blame the CAS for ruling within the WADA Code, and all of its broadened definitions and allowed presumptions and ambiguous guidelines. The CAS can rule the same way against Houlihan without considering any "possible but unlikely" arguments or evidence from the AIU and their experts. The AIU can hypothetically be 100% wrong, and the CAS can still find that Houlihan's evidence doesn't meet her burden of establishing "not intentional". To make her case concretely, she needed the same burrito, or another from the same batch, for testing.

I'm impressed by the many repeated arguments from USADA's long time chief Travis Tygart -- the guy who busted Lance and Salazar -- when he says that the WADA Code railroads innocent athletes into 4-year bans, treating them like dopers. In 2015, WADA made changes to the code that Tygart feels cross a line at the expense of fairness to innocent athletes.

The point of my posts here is that statements like "Shelby highly probably did drugs" cannot be found in the CAS report -- this only comes from "message board warriors".

Thank you, that is true!

You said earlier you were a scientist.

What is the probative value of upvotes and downvotes from anonymous "message board warriors" with no special knowledge?

Ayotte did claim at one time that Houlihan’s delta value of ~ -23 was normal. But even if she changed her views since then, she still presented a false picture of the research in order create a narritive that since 2018 (as new research on oral supplements showed many values around -23) her lab noticed nandrolone results in two groups around -23 and around -29. Then she proceeded to try and link Houlihan to Amazon.com supplements. The whole time she knew that research since 2002 has shown similar groupings and that measurements of supplements around -23 was rare at that time. I think the CAS and Ross Tucker should have examined the accuracy of these and other statements (e.g., 2.4 ng/mL after pork meat ingestion) after what happened in the Lawson case.

Nowt can or should be accepted from Casual as he invents stuff as facts and then after weeks of such being exposed eventually says that a lie is ok cos it is an analogy.

While casual "the scientist" obsever takes his time to not respond, finding temporary comfort in belonging to a group of 80 like-minded friends ...

This posts contains a lot of "popular" statements, but all of them are either contradicted by the CAS report, or studies on pork offal consumption.

What we learned from the CAS report is that a soy-fed diet would produce that isotope. We also learned that that isotope was Ayotte's previously published experience with volunteers eating pork offal.

What we learned from the CAS report, and Prof McGlone conceded, is that pigs were fed diets of soy during the pandemic, and the CAS was convinced that meat sourced during the pandemic would have been for sale that day.

What we learned from several studies, include one from Prof. Ayotte, is that pork offal ingestion can lead to these levels, and levels as high as 130 ng/ml and 160 ng/ml -- much much higher than 5.2 and 5.8 ng/ml that has been known for decades to easily occur with pork ingestion.

Houlihan didn't order a pork burrito, but a question Prof. Ayotte did not ask is, did Houlihan order any nandrolone products from Amazon (or anywhere)? That hasn't been established to any standard. If no one ordered nandrolone, there would truly be zero chance of intentional exogenous nandrolone use.

What was "this case" again? An automatic ADRV and a 4-year ban for the unnecessary to explain to WADA presence of nandrolone from a source that could be endogenous but could not be established. It is not logically possible to say based on all the known facts whether Shelby intentionally doped.

Oh but I forgot -- I'm the one ignoring established facts.

So true, you aren't going to ask, "What's AIU's next move "

As a long time sceptic looking for stronger evidence to support often repeated and strongly believed claims with weak to no basis, what I have observed in this domain of doping in sports, including among people who would seem to be otherwise smarter than that, there is a recurring pattern of attempting to draw strong conclusions on a partial set of facts, filling in gaps with speculation, and downplaying, if not ignoring, any inconvenient facts that don't stand with such conclusions, often resorting to feable name-calling and personal attacks for the intellectual crime of making unpleasant facts public.

To attempt to be fair to Prof. Ayotte, the previous figures of ~ -23 might not come from American corn-fed pigs -- there might yet be some recent measures specific to American pigs in a paper that hasn't been found yet. But that generosity cannot extend to her arguing 2.4 ng/ml as representative of a maximum, based on two studies with a small sample sizes based solely on meat ingestion (irrelevant to the case at hand which claims pork offal ingestion), when she herself has published several pork offal studies producing levels more than 50x higher. This looks like intentional deception to a CAS Panel which relied heavily on the AIU experts opinions and estimates. Seems like an area worth further examination -- maybe Ross didn't have the stomach for it.

It's almost like the CAS needs its own independent panel of scientific experts, to challenge and neutralize the opinions of dueling conflicting experts.

In respect of the bold above - yes - you do.