Centro defends Shelby

"Her and I". I guess he wasn't an English major at Oregon.

Sorry if it’s been covered- but I learned something new. I learned Centro was tested that same morning in December.

This tells me a lot.

1) I’m more likely to believe SH story now. If the world-calibre athlete she was living with was clean and she wasn’t, and he skipped the burrito truck, I think her story is much more plausible. Do we know if anyone else that ate at the truck was tested?

2) It’s clear they were targeting SH and Centro. Is this even legal to do? What are the odds that 2 athletes that were living together actually were selected for randomized testing on the same morning??

If it was not randomized and they were specifically targeted- that means planning was involved, perhaps days of planning, perhaps by several people, and that introduces a lot of other scenarios if someone was nefarious.

Shelby said she was with her boyfriend in her press conference the night before the test

Yeah there's planning involved in scheduling the tests, they focus on higher-performance athletes and those with shifty previous values. Nothing nefarious about it, a matter of limited resources and focusing them where they believe it matters.

The notion that Centro was tested alongside her had been, I thought, common knowledge (or at least, common assumption) since her PR call.

fatsos wrote:

Yeah there's planning involved in scheduling the tests, they focus on higher-performance athletes and those with shifty previous values. Nothing nefarious about it, a matter of limited resources and focusing them where they believe it matters.

The notion that Centro was tested alongside her had been, I thought, common knowledge (or at least, common assumption) since her PR call.

Thanks for clarification. I honestly didn’t know they targeted specific athletes. (And I also didn’t know Centro was tested that morning with her and was clean.)

I quite frankly think it’s insane we let a foreign organization specifically plan for and target certain athletes. All drug testing I’ve been involved in (non-athletic) is completely randomized for obvious reasons.

Being able to target individuals, and groups of individuals, and classes of individuals makes the testing very very suspect IMO and I would think would open them up to all kinds of discrimination claims. It would also lead to a higher chance of corruption within the system. Essentially a human is making a decision on who to test and when, that’s not a good system for so many reasons.

Best practice would definitely be to randomize the testing.

We should always believe an athlete desperate to avoid a violation over an independent panel whose job it is to make a decision based on the evidence put before it by the antidoping authorities, as well as the defence. Especially if the athlete is American (and white and nice. Nice people don't dope).

They have to discriminate. It is too expensive and impractical to test everyone so the next best approach is too focus on the group that is most likely cheating. Fortunately, this subset is very easy to identify - they are the ones at the top of the rankings. I’m not saying all those at the top are cheating, but that is where cheaters are most heavily concentrated.

Not relevant. It does not matter what type of person he think she is. What her positive attributes are. No one is saying that Shelby is not nice person and dedicated athlete. She seemed to be very well liked. However under the rules that govern the sport she tested positive and had due process. She failed to even come close to offering substantive proof to support her theory on why she had Nandrolone in her body. Her ban is just.

So Centro's argument is that he and Houlihan always ate the same thing at the truck and the one time she didn't she tests positive and he doesnt. Which means it could only have been the offal burrito. Or so he - and she - wants us to think.

But perhaps it wasn't anything she ate. Especially an offal burrito whose existence cannot be established. She might have been doping and it showed up on a test, like doping sometimes can do. It doesn't always. Unless it can be shown that a serving of an off-the-menu Mexican takeaway can easily result in the level of nandrolone found in her urine (which was two and a half times higher than what WADA considers could be endogenous) it might as well have been icecream.

fethullah gulen rupp wrote:

my $0.02? either tainted beef or tainted supplement (assuming they're not interested in coming clean). the sequence of events that had to occur for her to get a burrito stuffed with nandrolone-enriched pork is off the charts unlikely. yeah, she would have still gotten 2 years for a tainted supplement, but i'll bet in hindsight they wish they'd gone that way seeing as she got the 4 year, your-story-is-BS smackdown.

I do too think that's a good explanation.

Dude had nearly two weeks to get his story straight before commenting. Don't underestimate the power of a world-class athlete to also be a world-class liar. Too much is on the line for these guys. I can't help but think of Cain's comments in the NYT video about fearing that OTP would just "rebrand itself" and that none of the problems would really be fixed. Read the nearly 200 pages on Salazar's case and see how normalized it was to literally experiment on humans with little scientific data to back up what they were putting in their bodies. Getting too close to the line? No problem, just tamper with the medical records to make a 5-hour IV infusion look more legit.

He has the gall to say he ate there all the time (and where is 'there' again?) but he doesn't have the balls to say he ate dinner with her that night, because he doesn't want to be *that* implicated. He's looking out for #1. In the short term, looking out for #1 also means falling in line with the rest of the team's bloviating.

#5 the test was when USADA had halted testing for Covid, meaning athletes thought they had a better opportunity to get away with it.

I've now got the video starting at Houlihan comments:

https://youtu.be/33QXZHkxWDg?t=664

No, you're not affiliated with Q-ANON, you just like to throw around judgments and conclusions despite lacking a factual or informed basis. Still pretty far down the bad person continuum bud.

I keep seeing posts about SH being "2.5x over the limit." Has the limit been 100% confirmed? In the early days of this story, there were reports that upper limit for women was actually 5ng/ml. 2.5x indicates it is 2ng/ml, but I haven't seen that definitively anywhere from a reliable source.

If you actually look into the science behind the drug they ingested, it only stays in the body for a few days if they ingested it orally through pork. That means that the meat could’ve always been contaminated but it was only when Houlihan was tested right after eating there that it showed up. So, not as unbelievable as you make it out to be.

pupil3142 wrote:

This is organized 'bus avoidance'. When btc / nike had the discussion with SH, they said; 'you have popped, nothing we can do; bye bye'. She said; 'if you just abandon me, i will throw BTC/nike under the bus'. So they worked out this ridiculous compromise and now they have to play along with it. not only is it farcial, its going to unravel further - it must do.

I fully agree with the first part. But unfortunately it will not unravel further; Nike won the PR. Some people seriously seem to believe the comical beef burrito contaminated with *uncastrated* boar *offal* excuse, others pretend to do so in support of BTC/Nike.

Basically the story is over, and only Nike's PR came out, not even Nike's official statements to AIU or CAS.

Once CAS is ready to publish the damning details, Nike will simply veto it, citing privacy concerns. Done and done, nothing to see here.

olafuroc wrote:

If you actually look into the science behind the drug they ingested, it only stays in the body for a few days if they ingested it orally through pork. That means that the meat could’ve always been contaminated but it was only when Houlihan was tested right after eating there that it showed up. So, not as unbelievable as you make it out to be.

No way, given months to prepare an athlete could come with a scientific way that kinda sorta makes sense for how they tested positive for a banned substance so we now believe them innocent. What a high bar to clear. If we believe the ridiculous story of a food truck serving her pig organ from an uncastrated Male Boar and her not realizing she was eating pig organ instead of Carne Asada. Totally absurd, she would have either gone back and gotten a burrito with the right meat or thrown out the disgusting pig organ burrito and eaten literally anything else. That she was cheating and being less cautious about it because it was a period where USADA had halted all testing seems to be a lot more believable and likely scenario.

Plus the levels she tested positive for are much above the contamination levels in cases like Wilson, or Lawson. Not to say they were innocent or guilty, but their levels would indicate contamination was a reasonable cause, Shelby's really do not.

Track and field media has done nothing to challenge this story. LetsRun, SI/Chris Chavez/Citius Mag, and Kara Goucher and the NBC crew are all complicit in letting this slip through the cracks without serious investigation into the team or whatever really happened here.

But this is what we get when we let Make a Wish kids like Chris Chavez get real track journalism jobs... all he wants is to be friends with these athletes.