ADVERTISEMENT

Iowa native Shelby Houlihan blames pork burrito for positive steroid test

I like that she says that she reconstructed what she ate for the two weeks prior to the test once the positive came back. That to me is a clear giveaway that she is full of it.
I'm not sure how quickly the athlete is notified after the day of the test, but I would think it has to be at least a week or two. How many of us can remember what we ate more than two days ago? No one remembers those sorts of mundane details of their day. Even a professional athlete who closely watches their diet wouldn't remember more than 4 or 5 days ago. No way that a week or two, maybe more, after the test she was able to reconstruct her diet for the two weeks prior to the test. Its just not possible.
I buy this part. An elite athlete has a regimented diet. One of my wife’s cousins is a dietician who works with Olympic level athletes (And, works out like one), and she measures out everything.
 
I like that she says that she reconstructed what she ate for the two weeks prior to the test once the positive came back. That to me is a clear giveaway that she is full of it.
I'm not sure how quickly the athlete is notified after the day of the test, but I would think it has to be at least a week or two. How many of us can remember what we ate more than two days ago? No one remembers those sorts of mundane details of their day. Even a professional athlete who closely watches their diet wouldn't remember more than 4 or 5 days ago. No way that a week or two, maybe more, after the test she was able to reconstruct her diet for the two weeks prior to the test. Its just not possible.

the reconstruction makes me believe she was trying to figure out how a false positive happened.

I’m confident I could recreate my last 2 weeks of meals... especially sitting down with others with such high stakes.
 
  • Like
Reactions: LetsGoHawks83
It wasn't pork, per se, but offal, which is a collection of pig organs. Who goes to a food truck and orders a burrito made of pig parts?
tenor.gif
 
  • Like
Reactions: SI_NYC and JWolf74
If it was innocent (and I believe her) I do feel sorry for her. The level of dedication and volume of training world class track athletes like Houlihan go through is just mind blowing.

Imagine a similar athlete ...say Spencer Lee .... competing regionally and nationally from a young age, a record setting phenom, multiple All-American and national championships in college, world ranked .....then banned a week before the US Olympic trials in 2024 - in the prime of his career - due to a failed drug test. I believe almost all wrestling fans would believe Spencer Lee if he claimed he unknowingly ingested a banned substance. Shelby has that same kind of respect among track competitors and fans.
 
She's either guilty or acted totally recklessly with what she had on the line. It's her responsibility to know the rules, and to be aware of the "real world" consumables that could result in a positive. We see these type of "I didn't know" stories every year, and most of them are total bs.
 
She's either guilty or acted totally recklessly with what she had on the line.
There is certainly more to the story. If the polygraph and extensive follow-up testing she completed are (as claimed) accurate, then I think she deserves the benefit of the doubt as to what happened.

There is another possibility and it also relates to qualification at the US Olympic trials - sabotage!. Yes, a Tonya Harding situation :cool: A worker at the food stand - paid off by a competitor - deliberately spiked her burrito;)
 
This girl wouldn't "cheat" if someone held a gun to her head.......I believe she failed the steroid test.....I also believe her explanation. She has way too much time and work invested into trying to be a steroid test at this point in her career. Sometimes life just is not fair.
 
If it was innocent (and I believe her) I do feel sorry for her. The level of dedication and volume of training world class track athletes like Houlihan go through is just mind blowing.

Imagine a similar athlete ...say Spencer Lee .... competing regionally and nationally from a young age, a record setting phenom, multiple All-American and national championships in college, world ranked .....then banned a week before the US Olympic trials in 2024 - in the prime of his career - due to a failed drug test. I believe almost all wrestling fans would believe Spencer Lee if he claimed he unknowingly ingested a banned substance. Shelby has that same kind of respect among track competitors and fans.
We all believed Lance Armstrong too. Just saying.
 
I believe her?

Mercy mercy me!
Things ain't what they used to be.
Fish full of mercury
Chicken with antibiotics
Pigs on steroids
...
 
We all believed Lance Armstrong too. Just saying.
Yeah not quite the same but I get what you're saying. There will certainly be more information forthcoming in the months ahead. According to her team, the AIU has conceded that the failed test did not reveal levels which indicated accumulated use typical for doping. That seems important and supports her "single incident" claim.

OTOH, we don't know if she has had previous history with the AIU and we have not seen the evidence upon which the decision was made. I will say that handing down a long term ban against an American record holder seems to indicate that it was not a close call for the panel.
 
I’m with others on this. No way she’d risk her lifetime of work by eating at a place that wasn’t approved by her team and dietician. One thing is true of these things
1) she was doping and got caught.
2) she was recklessly foolish and risked everything she trained for for a burrito
3) wasn’t smart enough to have a cook/dietician approving her meals. Like almost every other serious Olympic level athlete I suspect has.
 

Her statement in link. She passed a polygraph test and had her hair tested (to disprove she didn't take anything regularly). No second test?
Is passing a polygraph even listed as part of the Olympic committee protocol on determining innocence or guilt in a doping case? I highly doubt it and for very good reason.

First (as I know you are aware) there are obvious reasons why in the legal world polygraphs are used to guide investigations and their area of focus but are not evidence of guilt or innocence.

It would be a horrible idea to suddenly allow athletes who tested positive for a ban substance to participate because they passed a polygraph saying they didn't do so knowingly or intentionally take the banned substance. What do you think would happen to the number of doping cases? I could see it going up......seriously. What would now stop trainers, handlers, and even parents from doping their athletes knowing the athlete will fail the drug test but be allowed to participate because they passed the polygraph.

Sucks if it really was just carelessness on her part but that is a hard lesson learned.

IMO her better defense might be to still maintain her innocence, miss Tokyo, and then attack the 4yr ban making her miss 2 Olympics due to the covid delay. Guessing the original reason for a 4yr ban is to make the person miss an Olympic and due to covid she will have to miss 2. She might do better trying to attack that.
 
Last edited:
There has always been a disturbing dark heart to the anti-doping movement, with its overconcentration on purity and talk of people as either “clean” or “dirty.” It mixes shabby, trailing science with over-righteousness and public denunciations. The anti-doping laboratory is a world in which there is either orthodoxy or heresy, and that never means any good for innocent people. Anti-doping is not a public policy. It’s a crude theology, and as Shelby Houlihan’s case shows, it has truly life-wrecking power.

Houlihan’s ban from the Olympics is just another landmark in the lousy moral migration of the anti-doping system. What began as a frightened and misguided attempt to control human chemistry with the founding of the World Anti-Doping Agency now has become a tribunal run by a few bishops with a philosophy of “When in doubt, punish.” That’s not justice. It’s dogmatism.
American distance runner Houlihan almost certainly ate something that triggered a positive test for a minimal amount of the steroid nandrolone. WADA itself warned its labs in 2020 to beware that trace amounts of nandrolone could be found in pork and result in false positive results. So what happened when Houlihan appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport with a food log that showed she ate a pork burrito from a food truck the day before her drug test? And offered hair samples that showed no nandrolone had accrued in her, which it would have if she used it regularly? She got a four-year penalty and banishment from not one but two Olympics.



The grounds on which the CAS denied her appeal? Under the WADA code, its labs always are “presumed” to be right.
Sign up for our Tokyo Olympics newsletter to get a daily viewing guide and highlights from the Games
The thing to understand about CAS is that it’s more royally inbred with WADA than Queen Victoria’s grandchildren with the czars. Ulrich Haas, a lead panel judge in Houlihan’s case, helped draft the WADA code.
There is a growing mountain of evidence that WADA is quite often, if not constantly, wrong, to the point that even some of its most longtime absolutists are beginning to wince. U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief Travis Tygart has acknowledged a string of “injustices.” Since 2016, about 30 cases of positive tests have been caused by athletes innocently ingesting something, a half-dozen in 2020 alone. In the case of rhythmic gymnast Kristen Shaldybin, it was municipal drinking water tainted by the local dumping of old prescription meds into the water supply.



In an especially notorious case, Jarrion Lawson, the 2017 world silver medalist in the long jump, served 19 months of a four-year ban for trace amounts of the steroid trenbolone picked up in a Japanese steakhouse beef bowl. He finally won on appeal when it became apparent that the WADA lab finding that had been “presumed” accurate was in fact misleading. Tygart, who has never been especially lenient, has begun to protest vehemently against WADA’s public scourging of athletes as drug cheats over a single low-level test. These are “no fault” cases, as he calls them. And yet they are forejudged as guilty by WADA standards.
Athletes are ephemeral creatures, their performative peaks shorter than the life of hummingbirds. Houlihan is 28, and in distance running that is just when you hit your stride. She’s the American record holder in the 1,500 and the 5,000 meters and had a distinct chance to medal in Tokyo. She is banned not just from those Olympics but also from the Paris Games in 2024.
This doubt-riddled verdict has stripped her of her best years — all because WADA insists on a zero-tolerance system. It prefers to victimize the innocent rather than let a single “guilty” party get away. It does not acknowledge the possibility of an innocent mistake by athletes and therefore cannot afford to admit its own mistakes.
Top American distance runner banned four years, rips drug testing procedures as flawed
If you’re going to have such a penal zero-tolerance system, you better be right, and you better be right all the time. In a cry of rage from the heart against WADA and the CAS, Houlihan’s coach Jerry Schumacher said, “What I’ve learned has eroded all the faith I had in their ability to fairly serve and protect clean athletes.”



“Shame on you!” he added in a statement posted on his club’s website. “Shame on you for not caring about the truth. Shame on you for using athletes in a political chess match. You got it very wrong this time and that is not okay. It’s not okay to be right nine out of ten times when deciding to execute someone’s athletic life and dreams. You do not deserve this power.”
No, they don’t. They never did. WADA is the ultimate expression of the International Olympic Committee’s old-world arrogance. It was founded in 1999 on the anxieties of European elites who feared that gold medalists were beginning to not look much like them, and might outstrip their amateur sailor-and-fencer illusions that they too were great athletes.
So they formulated their coarse absolutist theology of “purity,” not exactly a science-based system or a justice-based one — those have some tolerance for dissent and challenge. This is just a choleric and vengeful inquisition, a heresy hunt that refuses to admit any errors or doubts.

 
Hmm, haven't heard of it. I've only just started to get interested in sports because I changed my profession. In fact, it's a pity that this happened to her. Does any of you here know if she's been forgiven? I think this is very unsportsmanlike behavior, if the burrito should be blamed for everything, then the farmers who raised the pig with steroids should be arrested for this. I was talking about steroids with my friend from buyroidscanda.co and he advised me to try steroids. These are very contradictory substances. They have a good effect in small doses, but I doubt that animals are given them in small doses. We need to send a check, because the meat we eat affects our health.
 
Last edited:
It wasn't pork, per se, but offal, which is a collection of pig organs. Who goes to a food truck and orders a burrito made of pig parts?
You’ve never been to a real Mexican restaurant. Check out the menu from La Regia Taqueria in Iowa City (great Mexican food). They serve Buche tacos which is pork stomach.
 
Maybe in high school. Not in collegiate track. No fattys are running collegiate or higher level track. Field events sure, track nyah.
I meant in Iowa women in general. I dated a girls 400M state champ in HS. She was in phenomenal shape.
 
I meant in Iowa women in general. I dated a girls 400M state champ in HS. She was in phenomenal shape.
It's Iowa buddy. Any woman north of 30 is likely a porker. Have to be careful! I'm a unmarried loser in my 50's. 99% of my online matches are what one would call obese. Oh well. Should have married younger.
 
It's Iowa buddy. Any woman north of 30 is likely a porker. Have to be careful! I'm a unmarried loser in my 50's. 99% of my online matches are what one would call obese. Oh well. Should have married younger.
I was recently back in IC and I was shocked at how many of the college women were obese. Things have changed drastically at UI in the past 20 years.
 
I was recently back in IC and I was shocked at how many of the college women were obese. Things have changed drastically at UI in the past 20 years.

My sample which typically includes sitting on patios throughout the downtown area 2-3 times a week over the last 20 years finds your claims of your visit to be an unfortunate outlier. Iowa City is still a wonderfully beautiful place.
 
ADVERTISEMENT