Malcolm Gladwell: Why Was the Decision in Shelby Houlihan’s Doping Case So Unsatisfying?

Great article, right up until the last para:

"the process that found her guilty was completely inadequate to the task. You can’t rely on conventions and codes in a case that requires a story".

Am I interpreting this right - is he really saying that the WADA disciplinary process should require a compelling narrative from the prosecution explaining why and how the athlete doped?!? Doesn't that raise the bar to a level that would result in very few bans? Or does he just demand that in certain cases (like cases involving the athletes we like?)?

I think it is ridiculous that he should expect a compelling story from WADA when Houlihan herself presented one that was utterly implausible.

FWIW my best guess is she was taking a load of supplements - either against the advice of the BTC management, or without their knowledge - and, motivated as much by embarrassment as anything else - rather than admit that to jerry et al, she went along with the BS defence concocted by the lawyer. And after the melodrama of that press conference, it was just too late to come clean and admit she thought it was in a supplement.

Breakfast In Bed wrote:

Nandrolonologists of the World wrote:

Go on then genius debunk the 10,000 hours rule?

If a track runner averaged one hour a day of training in their respective events it would take over 27 years to get to 10,000 hours. Are no great track stars masters of their craft?

The original 10,000 hour rule referred to concert violinists.

Quantifying the "practice makes perfect" axiom for different running events is more problematic, but it doesn't debunk the original study hypothesis.

subelite hobbyjogger wrote:

bio Domer wrote:

She was either micro dosing nandrolone or she knew the source of contamination, and it was cross contamination in a shady lab making some other banned/controlled PED she was taking.

Gladwell wants to believe BTC because he’s a fan (was also a NOP fan, I believe!). Dude, you’re smarter than this, this group is highly suspect now.

I think that microdosing nandrolone is the most likely possibility. As has been noted elsewhere in this thread, the threshold for a positive is not zero. Nandrolone is very effective at alleviating joint pain. This is a benefit that other anabolics don’t have. This could obviously be beneficial for a distance runner.

How do you microdose nandrolone, given that a normal dose is detectable for many weeks?

Rojo, Gladwell has demonstrated such absolute liberal, progressive shortcomings I can no longer trust his judgment, which is obviously clouded. For what it's worth.

She's guilty.

Move on. Athletes like her like buses.

There will be another along any minute.

Dopers are a dime a dozen.

Many doping decisions are just destined to be unsatisfying. Pretty much all of the stimulants that can mask steroids, are of questionable value, or PEDs that are easily detectable. Not everything will be HGH, EPO, exogenous testosterone or blood doping.

That doesn't mean Gladwell's notion that drug testing isn't satisfying is correct. That'd be like saying Al Capone's arrest for tax evasion was unsatisfying because you didn't get him on murder.

Let's add whereabouts failures to this list. Gladwell if he took the same argument as last time would say that is the ULTIMATE dumb thing to do. You literally know you will get banned for that third missed test. There's no ambiguity in most cases. How stupid is that? Yet, it happens all the time because athletes are dumb, irresponsible, panicky, and yes in some cases might know they will be caught red-handed with a substance that will cost them up to 4 years. Sure, it's the latter in some cases but I think stupidity factors in quite a bit too.

Houlihan, by way of this testimony, didn't always ensure that she was self-disciplined. She states she consumed a greasy burrito in an Olympic build-up.

Two things spring to mind:

1) A self-disciplined person, especially in an Olympic year, would have watched what they ate. In fact, Flanagan's cookbook was part Houlihan's guide to healthier living.

2) According to the testimony provided, Houlihan did not discontinue eating the extra greasy burrito until it was nearly 3/4 consumed. Knowing the health risks that come with eating greasy foods (including immune responses), one would question whether Houlihan demonstrated self-discipline pertaining to her body and what went in it.

A third point also comes to mind:

As 'disciplined' and capable as Houlihan was at achieving astonishing acts, those acts did not come by accident. Houlihan would have had to have worked for those results and been willing to do what her coach challenged her to do on the track.

3) That disciplined person who put her head down and gutted through intense workouts had no single, solitary thought to bag the burrito and/or get it analysed. She apparently just gave in and gave up. That fighter? Capable of astonishing acts?

You are absolutely correct in the pitch that is given to athletes. To take it even further, the dope dealer often is a respected people who has a strong connection to the sport as in perhaps being a retired athlete. They will also state their knowledge of other athletes who are doping and more specifically athletes who are beating you. When someone provides you with evidence (pseudo evidence) that the athletes running incredible times and winning medals are doping and that you won't get caught. That pitch is an incredible inducement and many psychological experiments have shown that the average person under those circumstances have a high probability of being persuaded, using bad judgement, committing an immoral act -or whatever you want to call it. This belief among the LRC that dopers are demonic creatures devoid of a soul is false. They are regular people, like Shelby Houlihan and even Justin Gatlin. Sometime good people do bad things! The fact of the matter is, not everyone who is beating you are doping. Some athletes are just super talented and some athletes would never dope under any circumstances. The other fact is, for U.S. athletes, there is no doping regiment in which you can't get caught.

With all of that said, doping is pervasive in athletics, more so in 3rd world countries. There are countries where buying dope is as easy as buying an ice cream sandwich. Combine the easy access, with a poor AD program, poverty and you have the trifecta for the doping. When you see 4 African athletes run sub-14:15 in a 5K and all 4 athletes are connected -or 3 Caribbean athletes run incredible times in 100m dash and all 3 athletes are connected. Does any of this mean these athletes are doping, not absolutely, but most likely. Talent around the world isn't necessarily distributed equally, there are outliers who are born and raised at high altitude -or process fast-twitch DNA, but the differences in physiology, nutrition and training, etc. are significant enough that can't be approximated by the rest of the world. There are no humans that can do things that other humans can't 'possibly' do without doping. Plain and simple! Small clusters of highly successful 'connected' athletes who come from areas with the trifecta for doping, are "most likely doping". - There, I said it!

"My diet has come a long way since high school and college. I really started from the bottom. I used to have no idea what was healthy. In high school, I would mostly have McDonald's for breakfast or lunch. My freshman year of college was the bad year of eating fast food for almost every meal. After my freshman year, I did a pretty good job of not eating out too much and was mostly trying to make my own food, even though a lot of it probably wasn't very healthy—a lot of boxed or frozen meals.

"My senior year is when I really started learning how to eat right. As I’ve gotten older, I try to cook everything from scratch. It really helps being surrounded by my teammates and other professional athletes. I don’t buy anything frozen or boxed. When I’m looking for different kinds of yogurt, I’ll look at how much added sugar is in it, because a lot of food is really processed. If I can’t read what is in the ingredients, then I won’t buy it.

"I try to find natural and organic ingredients to cook with, like fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, and meat. I’ve really learned how to cook and make healthy food taste good. Cooking is fun and it’s become a hobby for me. Now, I prefer to make my own food instead of going out."

/Runners World / Eat Like an Elite: Shelby Houlihan

Potluck Bachelorette Nights

We’ll do group dinners with the whole team, girls and guys, back at home in Portland. We’ll each make a recipe out of Shalane’s cookbook and have a potluck-style dinner. A few favorites are the kale radicchio salad, flu fighter chicken and wild rice stew, marathon lasagna, and fish tacos with mango-avocado salsa, just to name a few. But we like pretty much everything in her cookbook. We’ll watch whatever show is on TV that night, like The Bachelorette.

Yet, on one fateful evening, you broke rank and everyone went out for authentic Mexican food. And then the boar sh!t was to hit the fan starting the next morning.

Sure.

Not 'unsatisfying'.

Plus Shelby guilty of putting out borderline racist story that suggests 'authentic Mexican food truck' would be somehow dirtier or sketchier than any other food truck.

Didn't Shelby indicate “I did everything I could to prove my innocence”?

She's misled people. She didn't do everything. She worked with her legal team on what she ingested and never disclosed any of the supplements, vitamins, pain killers, etc. that she may have been taking (if any). They could easily assert attorney-client privilege with respect to disclosing what she consumed, and lead everyone back to the burrito.

gumpyrunner wrote:

Potluck Bachelorette Nights

We’ll do group dinners with the whole team, girls and guys, back at home in Portland. We’ll each make a recipe out of Shalane’s cookbook and have a potluck-style dinner. A few favorites are the kale radicchio salad, flu fighter chicken and wild rice stew, marathon lasagna, and fish tacos with mango-avocado salsa, just to name a few. But we like pretty much everything in her cookbook. We’ll watch whatever show is on TV that night, like The Bachelorette.

Yet, on one fateful evening, you broke rank and everyone went out for authentic Mexican food. And then the boar sh!t was to hit the fan starting the next morning.

Sure.

Yeah, do they do that on occasion? Yes, I'm sure. Maybe they did it more when Quigley was there. But clearly they get from this food truck all the time based on their testimony. Then we have Shelby eating cheesecake as her sole food on the day, I mean was this a random "cheat day" or is she just plain dishonest/misleading about a great number of things? Note how Centro and Nick Willis have been quite clear about how they have pretty unhealthy diets. Meanwhile, we have Shelby on record many times talking about how diet is a huge part of her improvement.

We have her talking about how she doesn't use super-spikes because she doesn't want some unnatural improvement. Then we have her referencing a large number of supplements that she's taking. Because that couldn't theoretically be interpreted the exact same way.

Your reasoning for hating Alan's article is laughable. What has Justin Gatlin have to do with Shelby and her case?

There is never a pitch by the seller. The athlete approaches the seller in an effort to gain an unfair advantage over her/his competitors. They are never shocked to be caught as well, they know they can be caught anytime, but the more they use the bolder they get and then they get caught.

This article was a revelation for me. I think finally understand why the Brojos and so many others seem to think it's an ambiguous case. I don't have a lot of trust in the "story" method of making an argument, but now I understand why others find the story that goes along with the guilty verdict unconvincing.

Essentially, there is no story because nobody outside BTC knows how she got nandrolone in her system. She could have doped with it intentionally (although seemingly that would be ill-advised), she could have doped with a precursor, or with an illegal drug that was contaminated with nandrolone. She could have taken a supposedly-legal supplement that was contaminated with nandrolone (which would still cause a ban if proven).

Any of these is plausible, far more plausible than the burrito story. Nandrolone is one of the most common drugs for positive tests, after all. But we don't know which one it was, and we certainly don't know the surrounding details.

Meanwhile, Houlihan has a full story where each part is seemingly plausible, and ample corroboration of (unimportant) details and character witnesses. None of this actually "means" anything, but it changes the story. To tell the story that she is guilty, you have to admit that she told a full story, some of which we know to be true, but also that other parts aren't true and meanwhile she consumed nandrolone in some other specified way.

None of this is an out for Gault, the Brojos, and other journalists to keep muddying the waters here. The evidence is overwhelming that Houlihan illegally doped, regardless of what we know about "how". But given that I didn't understand these different ways of gauging truth, perhaps some of these writers didn't either. I would hope now that they'll reevaluate their credulity and write some pieces that are more true to the evidence.

I read this to mean: ""the process that found her guilty was completely inadequate to the task of convincing the public of her guilt. You can’t rely on conventions and codes in a case that requires a story if you expect the result to be satisfying"

Maybe I'm misunderstanding Gladwell's post, but given the rest of what he writes, I can't imagine that he's seriously advocating that CAS should switch to the "story" mode of adjudication. Or that somehow the anti-doping authorities are responsible for coming up with a story of exactly how Houlihan doped, instead of proving that she did dope.

I read this part of the post to mean that he doesn't find the ruling satisfying even though he knows it to be correct, and that cases like this are rarely satisfying. I also saw it as trying to explain why so many running journalists, such as those on this site, have been so credulous to Houlihan's ridiculous story.

conventions and codes wrote:

Meanwhile, Houlihan has a full story where each part is seemingly plausible, and ample corroboration of (unimportant) details and character witnesses. None of this actually "means" anything, but it changes the story. To tell the story that she is guilty, you have to admit that she told a full story, some of which we know to be true, but also that other parts aren't true and meanwhile she consumed nandrolone in some other specified way.

Which is exactly what they did. All Shelby really convincingly was able to relay was that she had a weird burrito which didn't seem to be Carne Asada the night before a drug test. Cool story, but connecting to the Nandrolone test result was a massive, unbelievable stretch. It is not on CAS/WADA to create a parallel story of how she actually did dope.