Shelby Houlihan BANNED for 4 years

Pubic hair is the preferred hair sample. It's less contaminated due to being less exposed to outside elements.

So annoying that some people get banned but others get away with it.

We should allow doping since we love to see WR’s.

Doping will always occur, most top athletes dope they just know how to avoid the system.

Not fair for those who play fair.

Let’s dope everyone it will be their responsibility if they die from drugs.

casual obsever wrote:

shocked I tell you again wrote:

My main point is that you are too quick to jump to judgement and therefore are too jaded.

Too quick? Both AIU and CAS have said no to this cheat's lame excuse, after seeing all the evidence.

shocked I tell you again wrote:

Assume for a moment that indeed Shelby IS innocent. What should she do to prove it?

1) Buy 10 more items of whatever she ate.

2) Have 4 of them tested in three different labs.

3a) Have 3 volunteering AIU officials tested.

3b) Have the same 3 AIU officials eat 1, 2, 3 of the remaining 6 items.

3c) Have the same 3 AIU officials tested again.

I bett she did zero of the above.

By the time she tested positive, what are the odds that the food truck is serving pork from the same pig? And let's say it does come back positive? What does that prove other than Nike can provide a food truck with the right pork.....

I am loving how much Jerry Schumacher is trying to point fingers at WADA and making it seem like they're the problem. I can't wait to watch the next couple months unfold, we're gonna have a circus of a show with this group, I can feel it. I've seen so many hypocrites in this scandal already. I'm curious what else they're gonna bring to the table. You never know with Americans.

The studies people are linking are all about meat specifically, not lard. Point to anything showing that lard can contain nandrolone, because I don't see it.

This would again have the issue that you need lard from wild or uncastrated hogs, which sounds even less likely than meat if the lard even did have nandrolone in it.

I just read an article by The Hill and it was titled "Olympic Hopeful blames positive steroid test on burrito." I am gonna enjoy this circus show for months to see what BTC and Houlihan comes up with. These people have no remorse except for getting caught. Thank you all for the laughs.

ddidididid wrote:

By the time she tested positive, what are the odds that the food truck is serving pork from the same pig?

Shouldn't matter which pig, if that alleged contamination is really common.

I believe the claim is that it was pork liver, which has been linked to positive tests for nandrolone. You do not usually use the liver in lard as it is pretty lean.

Pork livers usually would only make it into Mexican food if someone carved up a whole pig and then made carnitas or barbacoa. More often then not, pork is slow cooked in a big pot to get to a pulled pork consistency. Pork is relatively cheap and there is no reason to try to dilute pork with offal. It would also be pretty rare to find a food truck that was cooking a whole pig or getting its meat from someone cooking a whole pig.

Good point, but still questions:

1. Do steroids, naturally occurring or supplemented, accumulate in fat cells/fatty tissue to the same degree as liver cells?

2. If so, how much lard do you need to consume to equate to eating straight offal?

3. Are steroids broken down in fat when cooked?

Well that's a new one. I always thought lard was made from the fat. Apparently they now use the offal and magically transform it into fat.

I think it's more that lard is not specifically filtered to remove any offal. Low quality animal fat products may contain a lil bit of everything.

But yeah, fat is fat....

casual obsever wrote:

ddidididid wrote:

By the time she tested positive, what are the odds that the food truck is serving pork from the same pig?

Shouldn't matter which pig, if that alleged contamination is really common.

It isn't common in the US because it would be extremely difficult to find meat from an uncastrated pig - and if you did find it you would not want to eat it. There is a reason pig farmers castrate male pigs, it's not a make work project, it's because boar taint is terrible. For farmers who have an ethical concern about castration they will chemically castrate the pigs months before slaughter (using Imporvest) to prevent boar taint. People here obviously know nothing about pig farming - but even the timing of when you stop feeding the pigs before slaughter has been worked out (around 15 hours).

The use of the wording "authentic Mexican" and "food truck" was specifically used to create a belief that somehow the food source was dodgy making it more possible that the meat source was dodgy. But this is still the USA and the food truck industry in Beaverton is regulated - they aren't buying a pig out of the back of some guys van on the Mexican border.

Also, for her to have consumed enough uncastrated pig in a single burrito would have been like watching an episode of fear factor where they drink an entire blended rat. She'd remember trying to choke back that much of it.

Wrong. The previous poster is sooooo right on about the US meat industry.

Have you ever met or been on a large scale pig or chicken or beef operation? They feed those animals sooooo many drugs. Pigs can gain almsot 100 lbs in their last weeks of life because of all the steroids they are on. The quicker the owners can butcher the chicken and hogs, the more money they can get. If they can now produce 2-3 yields a year versus what used to be 1-2- they get more money. Our meat industry is beyond disgusting.

Is it possible for Shelby to run at the Trials provisionally?

Pending further appeals and investigations?

They did say the amount. Jonathan Gault reported it as, IIRC, 5 ng/ml. have no idea if that's a lot or a little so hoping we get some actual journalism about this soon.

Just to add some extra (inside baseball) context. The adverse finding was 5 ng/mL, which as a scientist isn’t that useful as a measure of concentration because it doesn’t take into the molecular weight of the molecule...

I looked up the molecular weight of nandrolone, which is 274.404 g/moL. This means that you need to dissolve 274.404 g of nandrolone in water to make a 1 molar (M) solution (note, molar concentrations are equivalent between molecules because they have the same number of molecules per volume).

Converting the 5 ng/mL value to a molar concentration in a stepwise fashion goes as follows:

274.404 g of nandrolone in 1 L = 1 M (molar)

27.4404 g in 1 mL = 1 mM (millimolar)

27.4404 mg in 1 mL = 1 uM (micromolar)

27.4404 ug in 1 mL = 1 nM (nanomolar)

27.4404 ng in 1 mL = 1 pM (picomolar)

So, the 5 ng in 1 mL = 0.182 pM or 182 fM (femtomolar) of nandrolone in her urine sample.

182 fM is a very low concentration, although certainly detectable by modern mass spec instrumentation. I would be interested in seeing the lab reports comparing A and B samples plus the error range (I would expect at least triplicate analysis of both samples to be carried out). The comparison between A and B samples plus error ranges would inform whether the nandrolone levels in Shelby’s urine were really 2.5 x the 2 ng/mL (72.8 fM) allowable limit (or if the errors in measurement put it in a range that could be significantly lower or higher than this).

Alternate Reality wrote:

Is it possible for Shelby to run at the Trials provisionally?

Pending further appeals and investigations?

No, she's done. That's why they had the press conference yesterday. They were trying to exhaust every possibility to get her even to the point where she could run provisionally, then get public outcry that the top American runner at the Trials wouldn't get to go to the Olympics to get the ban overturned. USATF would get banned from the Olympics if they let her run at this point.