Travis Tygart doesn't think Shelby Houlihan is a doper

Did you read what Tygart wrote before offering your opinion? I do read all of the stuff I write, as well as the stuff you write, and others, and much more.

I appreciate your concern, but it is not necessary nor warranted. My concern is not for Houlihan, but for the sport. This case, and others like it, prosecuted under the Code in its current form harms the sport greatly by convicting, with 4-year bans, and turning fans against, both innocent and guilty athletes alike, for a failure to solve the mysteries of the meat industry (or pharmaceutical industry) over small quantities of a banned substance with questionable effect that can be found in food and medicine.

My concern goes far beyond Houlihan -- the AIU's argument would completely fall apart in the context of 50 Kenyans busted for nandrolone in a country that doesn't routinely castrate its pigs, where its athletes typically cannot afford 5 or 6 figures to challenge the charges.

As smart as you may be, no one seems smart enough to correctly model probabilities. The probabilty, given her positive test result, that she truly intentionally doped with supplemental nandrolone is not the inverse complement of the "near zero" probability argued before the CAS, and neither of these are the probability of "not intentional" that she needed to establish. Simple statistics shows that with 121,000,000 opportunities per year, we can expect a 1 in 10,000 event to happen around 12,000 times per year - in the USA. We are not talking about infinitesimally small possibilities any longer.

Is Ross still a scientist? Looks like he gets paid to write today. I'm happy to read his scientific work on thermal regulation and hydration and osmolality and any of his ideas on the Central Governor model. I also read his book on exercise physiology co-written with Jonathon Dugas and Matt Fitzgerald. Which other scientists are you on the side of here? Are you on the side of Prof. Ayotte's peer-reviewed work, which supports Houlihan, or what she told the CAS, which favors the AIU?

Ross explained the decision in the context of the WADA Code, but it is the very context that is being called into doubt by Tygart. Tygart has much more direct experience here than Ross.

In this case, I'm on the side of US anti-doping chief Travis Tygart, whose statements I've also read, not only in the latest interview, but many times in the last few years, who has repeatedly argued that the WADA code needs reform because it places a near impossible burden on athletes to prove that ingestion was incidental. It's no wonder that Tygart has become a personal target for expressing his professional opinion, with "smart fans" calling for his removal. Sometimes -- see the proven innocent case of Getzmann -- an athlete can succeed, with a stroke of luck, to establish his innocence, but still at great personal cost in legal and scientific fees, while still serving a 1-year suspension.

I'm concerned about whether convincting someone at all costs, for the undisputed ingestion of the low level of ~5 ng/ml, does way more harm than good.

How were they caught before 2015, when athletes were not required to prove "not intentional"?

The trade-off here is whether it is worth catching more guilty athletes by catching more innocent ones too, with a process that cannot tell them apart.

In Houlihan's scenario, the WADA TD explicitly cautions about the possibility of nandrolone in the low ng/ml range of less than 10 ng/ml, and sometimes more, by pork meat/offal ingestion, and how it can cause both excessive levels and potentially invalidate isotope analysis. The correct outcome is to do the "optional" pharmacokinetics, or treat the result as an ATF, and initiate more agressive, intelligent, target testing. Either way, the only way to resolve the ambiguities described in the TD is to collect more data.

In the broader scenario described by Tygart, we are still only talking about the small subset of cases consistent with incidental ingestion from food or prescribed medicine (supplements are known to be riskier and the athlete is on explicit notice).

I think it is not too much to ask to make sure a process established to protect innocent athletes does more to attempt to distinguish incidental unknowing ingestion from genuine intentional doping, rather than risking penalizing innocent athletes unable to meet a near impossible burden.

What is a supplement? All players at Wimbledon were taking are openly seen taking them.

And… we had the commentators gleefully saying the “ Nadal’s drug are kicking in”

All a big big mess and shows what happens with moral panic.

One element is that the non guilty get swept up with the guilty.