SHELBY HOULIHAN SPEAKS! Issues statement, does RW Q&A & 90min podcast explaining her side.

rekrunner wrote:

Dynamic duo wrote:

Bingo. She was way over the limit. Nandrolone is performance enhancing. Regardless of how it got in there, her performance would have been enhanced.

You are wrong on both counts. "Way over the limit" is relatively meaningless when the limit is arbitrarily small. According to the WADA TD2021NA, the labs can typically expect small values less than 10 ng/ml, but occasionally higher, from pork ingestion, and even 15 ng/ml for women on birth control, and fluctuating values during pregnancy.

1) AIU expert Prof. Ayotte conducted a study with one subject producing 130 ng/ml. By comparison 5.2 ng/ml and 5.8 ng/ml are quite small amounts. One would only have to eat 15g, or half an ounce, of these parts (say ground up in a spicy chorizo ingredient in a greasy pork stomach burrito) to reach these levels. Before 2004, the limits were 2ng/ml for men and 5ng/ml for women, and even then, each case had to be considered on a case by case basis. These limits were controversial then. In a 1998 study in Nagano on 621 Olympic athletes, only 5 athletes exceeded the threshold — all women.

2) Nandrolone might be performance enhancing for distance runners (even that has not yet been established, but for the sake of argument), if large quantities were injected, like CJ Hunter resulting in 2000 ng/ml. But from the evidence of one time ingestion of this small quantity, most of which never entered the bloodstream due to being filtered out in first pass, it can hardly be argued that the remaining small quantity is performance enhancing.

ALH359 wrote:

"Q: Another question about the study Ayotte cited (which she herself helped conduct in 2006): she said that none of the subjects who consumed boar meat had a nandrolone concentration of more than 2.4 ng/mL in their urine. But only three subjects in the study ate 300g of boar meat and there aren’t many other studies on this topic. In the sports science community, is a three-person study enough to accept the finding as accurate? Or could/should Houlihan’s team have argued this is far too small a sample size from which to draw a meaningful conclusion?

Ross Tucker:

"Any study will always benefit from more participants and data points, but to be fair, that Guay study used 18 volunteers who ate a total of 150 meals. The explanation in the paper is a bit confusing, but my read of it is that 18 volunteers actually ate numerous meals of various combinations of edible parts, including 300g of meat, while only three of the 18 also ate the smaller 100g meat portion. They’ll argue that they were “loading the dice” by doing it this way – in fact, Ayotte does exactly this in Point 111, when she explains that they used old boars to maximise the level of androgens, that they ate very large portions, and that most of them ate this 300g portion. The rationale would be that if the 300g portions that were eaten multiple times by 18 volunteers didn’t trigger a positive test unless it had kidney in it, then a 100g portion would be highly unlikely to trigger a positive test. They’ll say why bother with a lower dose in many people when the higher dose didn’t do it anyway which I can understand.

Then there is a second study, out of Germany, also cited at CAS, that used 12 subjects who ate between 187g and 491g of boar meat, and the highest concentration of 19-NA measured was 2.1 ng/ml (Houlihan’s values were 5.2 and 5.8 ng/ml). Based on the Decision, CAS found these two studies IN CONJUNCTION with the isotope signature (this is an important point — the level and type both argued against Houlihan’s claim) to be convincing."

Link:www.letsrun.com/news/2022/04/sports-sc...

Funny how the clown posse (Shelby & Co.) has changed their story and now say it's possible that the nandrolone hadn't come from the burrito. I wonder if the above had anything to do with their change of excuses.

Questions about it wrote:

Tittybutihszcaq wrote:

Still have not got it.

5 min guy still has to follow the rules.

Plenty of low level rugby players tested and caught.Think a few old masters athletes as well ; but rules are rules

Bruhh…this tedious. Let’s loop this around to where we began.

Your argument was basically: now the millions of athletes who do a WADA sport need to meticulously keep a food log in case they accidentally ingest a PED.

If that is what you are worried about, I’m telling you it’s gonna be all right. The vast, vast majority of athletes, even pretty good ones, never needs to worry about what’s getting put inside their burritos. Ya, we’ve learned that maybe there’s a 1/10,000 chance this will put a little nandy in your system. Doesn’t matter what the rules are, because the vast, vast majority of athletes will never find out becuase they will never be drug tested.

No one cares enough to bother testing anyone but those at the top of the sport, so an accidental ingestion, legal or not, will never be known or punished. So to everyone else, you’ll never need to figure out some mystery of how an elevated metabolite got there. Problem Solved!

Now if this is your profession and you are the American record holder, you can expect regular visits from your an anti-doping agency. We’ll know if you’ve been naughty or nice or just careless. So might as well keep a record of what you’ve been eating and be super careful since your livelihood depends on it.

I can’t make it any simpler than that.

rekrunner wrote:

Salvitore Stitchmo wrote:

That's what I mean. You went to such lengths to concoct this story that relied not just on one infinitesimally small probability but like 6 or 7 of them, all reliant on each other and then within a few weeks of your final lifeline being snuffed out you come back with "well now it could be the vitamins"?! "Even though my story sounded implausible it was the best implausible story I had at the time"?! I mean you can't be serious right. Jesus, love him or hate him you have to at least respect how Lance never ever sold out on his story right until the bitter end, and that was mostly because he had to or else go to jail. The best piece of advice anyone could have given her was to "Shut. The. F--k. Up." because there were a group of flat-earthers out there who believed in the 0.000000001 possibility that she ate the wrong burrito which just happened to have hormones in it that spiked her nandrolone levels due to her menstrual cycle which sadly coincided with the first drug test she had had in 9 months because of a global health crisis. But now? As I said before if anyone still believes her they need some kind of medication.

If the story is so infinitesimally improbable, why has Prof. Ayotte been studying nandrolone ingestion from pork for decades, and publishing studies showing Houlihan's values are well within her own research, with respect to both levels and endogenous carbon isotopes?

We already knew last year, when the CAS verdict came out, that Houlihan tested her vitamins and they all came back negative, but that she didn't have all of them from the same batch, so that door hasn't been completely closed.

Despite recent misinterpretations now, her story from the beginning hasn't really changed -- she didn't and doesn't know where the nandrolone came from, and after the vitamins came back negative, pork offal ingestion was considered the most likely source.

She is just saying she still isn't 100% sure where the nandrolone came from.

ALH359 wrote:

"Q: Another question about the study Ayotte cited (which she herself helped conduct in 2006): she said that none of the subjects who consumed boar meat had a nandrolone concentration of more than 2.4 ng/mL in their urine. But only three subjects in the study ate 300g of boar meat and there aren’t many other studies on this topic. In the sports science community, is a three-person study enough to accept the finding as accurate? Or could/should Houlihan’s team have argued this is far too small a sample size from which to draw a meaningful conclusion?

Ross Tucker:

"Any study will always benefit from more participants and data points, but to be fair, that Guay study used 18 volunteers who ate a total of 150 meals. The explanation in the paper is a bit confusing, but my read of it is that 18 volunteers actually ate numerous meals of various combinations of edible parts, including 300g of meat, while only three of the 18 also ate the smaller 100g meat portion. They’ll argue that they were “loading the dice” by doing it this way – in fact, Ayotte does exactly this in Point 111, when she explains that they used old boars to maximise the level of androgens, that they ate very large portions, and that most of them ate this 300g portion. The rationale would be that if the 300g portions that were eaten multiple times by 18 volunteers didn’t trigger a positive test unless it had kidney in it, then a 100g portion would be highly unlikely to trigger a positive test. They’ll say why bother with a lower dose in many people when the higher dose didn’t do it anyway which I can understand.

Then there is a second study, out of Germany, also cited at CAS, that used 12 subjects who ate between 187g and 491g of boar meat, and the highest concentration of 19-NA measured was 2.1 ng/ml (Houlihan’s values were 5.2 and 5.8 ng/ml). Based on the Decision, CAS found these two studies IN CONJUNCTION with the isotope signature (this is an important point — the level and type both argued against Houlihan’s claim) to be convincing."

...

Funny how the clown posse (Shelby & Co.) has changed their story and now say it's possible that the nandrolone hadn't come from the burrito. I wonder if the above had anything to do with their change of excuses.

Questions about it wrote:

Tittybutihszcaq wrote:

Still have not got it.

5 min guy still has to follow the rules.

Plenty of low level rugby players tested and caught.Think a few old masters athletes as well ; but rules are rules

Bruhh…this tedious. Let’s loop this around to where we began.

Your argument was basically: now the millions of athletes who do a WADA sport need to meticulously keep a food log in case they accidentally ingest a PED.

If that is what you are worried about, I’m telling you it’s gonna be all right. The vast, vast majority of athletes, even pretty good ones, never needs to worry about what’s getting put inside their burritos. Ya, we’ve learned that maybe there’s a 1/10,000 chance this will put a little nandy in your system. Doesn’t matter what the rules are, because the vast, vast majority of athletes will never find out becuase they will never be drug tested.

No one cares enough to bother testing anyone but those at the top of the sport, so an accidental ingestion, legal or not, will never be known or punished. So to everyone else, you’ll never need to figure out some mystery of how an elevated metabolite got there. Problem Solved!

Now if this is your profession and you are the American record holder, you can expect regular visits from your an anti-doping agency. We’ll know if you’ve been naughty or nice or just careless. So might as well keep a record of what you’ve been eating and be super careful since your livelihood depends on it.

I can’t make it any simpler than that.

Salvitore Stitchmo wrote:

I understand your "devils advocate" POV here and I get it you want to remain fact based etc etc.

You are overlooking something really important here - you are assuming that every case (in this Houlihans) has conditions that match the controlled "study" of Prof. Ayotte. That is simply flawed logic.

And look I'm okay (not really because it's still ridiculous but at least respectful of someone's right to have an opinion) if prior to this latest course-correction/pivot, someone wanted to believe the burrito story and the "so you're saying there is a chance" narrative.

But after these latest comments if you don't begin to see the tell-tale signs of deceit then I don't know what to tell you. Must be fun living in a world with such blissful ignorance just believing anything you are told.

Final point, yeah we get that she is still saying "she still isn't 100% sure where the nandrolone came from" - isn't that an issue for you? I mean it was still there right? And we can be pretty sure it wasn't from an incorrectly ordered burrito (if you want to argue that go argue Ross Tucker) and I'm pretty sure the tooth fairy didn't jab her in the middle of the night with a rogue dosage of nandrolone. So it came from somewhere and it's not WADAs job to tell her. So an athlete can just take whatever they want and say "I dunno where it came from you tell me"?

Just stop - you're to be intellectual here and play this "good cop" role but you are insulting your own intelligence dude. You are beginning to sound as delusional as Shelby.