Red flags in the Houlihan case that need explaining

Very good points, and one minor one I will add: Naturally, Houlihan purports to follow Shalane Flanagan's cooking approach (as she is her coach), as outlined in her cookbooks. Not for anything but Shalane is all about organic, grass fed, local, free range, blah blah blah meat. Of course, everybody splurges every once in a while, but the idea that SH - entering into the most important season of her life - ate a sh!tton of overly greasy, mystery meat from a food truck just does not ring true to me. If you read Shalane's books this will make more sense to you. She could literally tell you the specific name of the ranch where her hamburger meat came from. She's not Tom Brady levels of neurotic, buuuut...

Also, for some reason it really bugs me that they keep saying an "authentic" Mexican food truck.

nearest hippie wrote:

Also, for some reason it really bugs me that they keep saying an "authentic" Mexican food truck.

It implies "suspect"

Excellent post, OP!! Thank you!

lol yep. Initially I took it in the hipster-way. Authentic can, to a certain hipster-ish subset, mean local, and therefore healthier. As in, "Yeah, I wasn't cooking my own burrito from scratch with free range, grass fed meat, but it's not like I ordered a Whopper from Burger King."

But it also serves a double purpose of seeming third-world.

I hope I don’t taint this thread with this comment, but here goes...

Money talks. Nike etc are pretty big, and pretty important. Although they don’t “own” testing agencies, you can bet that testing agencies give them and their athletes more respect than they give to some joe off the street. This is only natural, as they have more resources and will be more expensive to deal with.

There have historically also been some “understandings” between certain agencies and individuals, and certain camps, athletes, and countries.

Houlihan MAY have been a sacrificial lamb of sorts, and is now butthurt along with her sponsors because until now “everything has been going fine.” Why now? I don’t know—maybe an equalization between countries, maybe an equalization between races, maybe deals to favor certain other countries/athletes because of bribes of the type for which there is historic precedent, who knows.

What I do strongly suspect is that they watch people, and can decide to go after someone in particular, for whatever reason. I think there is some sort of entente at play. All it takes to go after someone is to pattern their behavior, and adjust and target investigative actions accordingly.

In my admittedly only semi-rational heart-of-hearts, I believe that she, like Coleman, has been using for a while, and for whatever reason was targeted over time. If everything has been situation normal and now they take you down, you are left butthurt because you knew you were playing with fire, and eventually got burned.

Think of Coleman: he is the only one undefeated against the darling Bolt. Can’t have that. Now everything he did is tainted, and Bolt’s golden legacy lives on, he is effectively undefeated and is great fodder for all sorts of ads and promotional material.

Houlihan, idk. Maybe it was Nike or Schumacher who were the problem, who knows.

It’s a system that seems two-faced and inequitable to those who play the game according to unwritten understandings. To that type of game you have to bring at least enough firepower to ensure a mutually-assured destruction scenario.

Just rambling.

Qdoba puts 3.5 ounces of meat in a burrito, which is a third of 300 grams. That being said, she is likely smaller than the males in the study, so that would effect things. The odds of the taco truck having uncastrated boar meat and her getting a bunch of pig organs confused with carne asada are pretty much nil (it would pretty much be inedible). Tripe tastes horrible. The story seems unlikely.

Continuing to bump this excellent post so that it hopefully gets highlighted on the front page.

casual obsever wrote:

SDSU Aztec wrote:

There is zero evidence to support the belief that Schumacher was involved. It was Houlihan that tested positive and not him.

Yes - but Schumacher went out of his way in defending the banned drug cheat - even after CAS confirmed her ban - and instead of scolding the doper, he tried tear down the anti-doping system. That speaks volumes.

He undoubtedly likes her and defending her does not make him complicit. He is biased in her favor, subsequently believes she is being treated unfairly and wants to support her. If you were Schumacher, would you bail on her?

used to run in college wrote:

It's just over half a pound of meat or a large hamburger. Think double meat burrito at chipotle. It's big but not crazy big. As for the pig offal, it's like no one on this forum has eaten from a fancy food truck before. Where they are popular (often due to the low start up costs compared to a a brick and mortar restaurant), food trucks typically look to stand out in some way. Exotic meats should not be surprising at a Portland area food truck.

300g is what the paper used and got a 7.5 result. We have no clue if 150gms would have gotten a 5. We have no clue what the differences in. absorption and precessing differences are between a 180lb sedentary male and 115lb high active female is. That is all basic common sense. You would need to be a moron to think she would need to eat 300g.

This feels like a drug you never should get caught using if you are taking it orally. It clears from the system quickly. Take it at the start of your window(takes some time to be absorbed) and then by the time your glowing, it has cleared. By the time your window reopens, you are below the limit. And it sounds like if she was injecting, she would have been positive on the test right after.

That doesn't mean she is innocent. Maybe she was 3 hours late taking her dose. Maybe she decided on trying 50% more for an Olympic year. Maybe she was dosing right up to the limit and the pig out her over the top. And so on.

I would sort of like to see her take a test every day for 6 months. If she can run 355 while doing that I might believe the pig story. If she is a 405 runner? You do the math....

data hack wrote:

Good post!

I see three possible scenarios:

1) She ate a burrito tainted with pig offal - as you said, this is extremely unlikely given the low probability that not only would her carne asada order been screwed up, but the huge quantity that she would have needed to consume. Yet this is the defense that her team presented.

2) She doped with nandrolone - she took a chance that the drug would clear out of her system before her next drug test and lost the gamble.

3) She took a supplement that was contaminated with nandrolone - I have read that nandrolone contamination is a somewhat common occurrence, so this is entirely possible. Her defense never presented this possibility and she would obviously face consequence if this were the case, although probably not as severe as a 4 year ban.

So in my book, it's either 2 or 3.

Two is the answer.

Nike and Houlihan have known about the positive test for about half a year now. They have not cited scenario 3 as a possibility, so I think we can rule that out entirely.

It’s a shame but she’s guilty.

Good OP.

I think you're overcomplicating things here. The drug testers don't really care about narratives — they try to bust people pretty ruthlessly. Especially the best guys. Coleman, they know doesn't/hasn't been getting busted at the meets he runs at. And he was a guy who raced semi-frequently. So, if you were naive to the sport you'd say that's enough, he gets tested 10x a year in competition and we can mix in 3-4 other random tests during the year and it's all good if he missed 1-2. But that's not how it works. That doesn't satisfy the OOC testers who found him high-maintenance and obnoxious to deal with. He'd not be where he said was, require them to give him a head's up, and even then misses tests and treats the whole process unprofessionally. Because of this him and Nasser, for another example, get a deluge of tests. She through technicalities evades a ban for missed tests, but you can be certain that they are not letting her be at all.

High hopes wrote:

5. How likely is it that Houlihan ate around 300g of pig offal at precisely the length of time (10 hours) before she was due to be tested? In this article, it states that 310g of offal from a particular type of uncastrated boar raised nandrolone levels to around that found in Houlihan's system after 10 hours, but the level returned to normal after 24 hours. This is one hell of a coincidence. A sceptic might ask whether the details were made to fit around the evidence

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10861987/

Its a strict liability offence so, as all athletes and coaches know, the way the system works is that the doping agencies only have to prove that two positive test samples were obtained and that procedures were followed.

It sounds like the appeal simply did the usual "procedures were flawed" thing and didn't properly prove that, and then simply tried to claim that the burden of proof was somehow reversed and that a higher standard of proof than normally required by strict liability was required. This was always unlikely to succeed.

What you would expect to see would be a big attempt by Houlihan and her team to trace the source of the contaminated meat, to provide irrefutable evidence to CAS of the source of the positive test.

Uncastrated pig meat sales are so unusual that it should not have been that difficult to have done this. If your career and Olympic prospects were at stake, and you had the receipt showing when and where the burrito was purchased, why wouldn't you make more of an effort to do this?

Why in fact would you eat poor quality, bad tasting meat from a burrito truck and take such a risk in the first place?

The statements from both Houlihan and Schumacher are both so implausible in places that they aren't plausible. They are relying on the tendency of people to believe others are telling the truth when the lie is so audacious that its hard for people to believe its a lie.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

casual obsever wrote:

+1

Mods will be mods, and letsrun stands up for drug cheats as per usual.

Nike PR won once more with all their smokescreens.

Instead of arguing whether or not AIU and CAS are corrupt after yet another American athlete got caught and subsequently banned, one should push for dismantling BTC, and drive Schumacher and Flanagan out of the sport like NOP/Salazar.

There is zero evidence to support the belief that Schumacher was involved. It was Houlihan that tested positive and not him.

The default assumption is that Scumacher cares more about his reputation and retaining his job than the success of one of his athletes. It's garbage to make baseless accusations and stating them as if they are facts.

I disagree.

If he had no knowledge or involvement then himself and Shalane would have put a little distance between themselves and drug cheat Shelby Houlihan without entirely throwing her under the bus.

Instead they both came out promoting her innocence and claiming none of them have heard of nandrolone. For the record that is Shelby, Shalane, Schumacher and Nessa Fraser who all claim they’d never even heard of nandrolone 😂

Come on man.

excellent summary, this needs to be pinned it has everything in one place.

Former Houlihan fan wrote:

Two is the answer.

Nike and Houlihan have known about the positive test for about half a year now. They have not cited scenario 3 as a possibility, so I think we can rule that out entirely.

It’s a shame but she’s guilty.

I think actually a variation of 3 is the answer. Not a legal supplement, but an illegal testosterone-boosting substance that had nandrolone. If you're Shelby/Nike/lawyers you can't touch that with a ten-foot pole because it doesn't exonerate you. You can't claim supplement for #3 without going down a rabbit hole of supplements and unlike Brenda Martinez I don't believe Shelby has the paperwork/the plausible story. So I agree the tainted legal supplement defense is out.

She already lost her appeal.

She will not be innocent.

Guilt as charged.

byron evans wrote:

Trump! Trump!! Trump!!! wrote:

Regarding your point 5. since when will you get a burrito from a food truck that has 300g of meat? I mean, how would you even stuff that much meat into a burrito unless the thing is like the size of a large calzone?

Not just meat-- offal meat.

Do another zoom meeting with her eating 300g of offal wild boar meat with a straight face like it's MFing carne asada and maybe I'll buy her story.

Chipotle suggests that they have 113 grams of meat in their burritos. One 4oz scoop. Even if this taco truck does double the amount AND it's 100% pig offal meat, still might not trigger a positive test.

Correct. I get that Gault and the owners of this website want to believe she didn't dope. But they are parroting the flimsy BTC excuse/narrative and ignoring facts. This original post should be the basis for the main thread on the topic.