Burrito discourse, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate
It seems that this blog lies in wait for the confluence of a niche sport, corruption, and corporate PR debacles. The Shelby Houlihan doping scandal checks all the criteria, and unfortunately, I have decided to weigh in on the matter despite very little expertise and a minuscule platform. Forza.
My thesis statement: all of this sucks big time!
THE #MEDILL LEDE:
As the track world descended on Nike’s new track palace in Eugene to participate in the long-anticipated 2021 Tokyo Olympic Trials (that these Olympics are occurring at all given the global situation is its own controversy, but I’ll let it go for now), there was breaking news. Shelby Houlihan, the current American record holder in the 1500m and 5000m, announced she had been given a four-year ban from the Athletics Integrity Unit for testing positive for nandrolone, an anabolic steroid.
[For non-track fans, this is the equivalent to a top-tier NBA star getting popped for steroids, similar in gravity to A-Rod’s Biogenesis suspension but without the outlying conspiracy...so far]
As every single media outlet has noted, Houlihan’s excuse was eating a tainted burrito at a food truck hours before her drug test in December 2020.
For the extremely insular and not entirely logical world of American distance running, this news was a meteor strike for the discourse. For one, high-profile American distance runners don’t get busted for doping very often, whether that’s a result of being clean or being good at pretending to be clean. Houlihan was part of Bowerman Track Club (BTC), an elite, Nike-backed outfit long renowned for its great times, active social media presence, nice people, and (supposedly) clean reputation. As an Outside Online feature noted in 2019, the last round of distance running discourse surrounding the ban of star coach Alberto Salazar and the dissolution of the Nike Oregon Project left Bowerman Track Club and head coach Jerry Schumacher as The Premier American Team. On the other hand, BTC hasn’t actually won much hardware on the global stage since its inception, but this Olympic cycle was designed to be a true coming-out party for the team, especially after adding Nike Oregon Project refugee and 2016 1500m gold medalist Matt Centrowitz. Even better, they were widely assumed to be clean.
In a sport where eyeballs are precious, BTC was able to draw paid live stream audiences for its time trials and have its athletes become influencers on social media. The somewhat cringeworthy “Bowerman babes” appellation became a real thing, and Nike really went for the strategy of making the team a real beacon for active millennials with disposable incomes and cell phone addictions. To use a Formula 1 analogy, Shelby Houlihan was the No. 1 driver in the stable on the women’s side, qualifying for the 2016 Olympics in the 5000m and effectively dominating the US women’s events at national meets for years.
And then everything went very poorly. Barring a Hail Mary from Swiss lawyers, Houlihan will miss the next two Olympic cycles, and Bowerman Track Club will now have to face the music on doping that they have scrupulously tried to avoid.
To contextualize, most people know that track has been a sport that has been riddled with doping issues for the last 50 years. Distance running has seen plenty of these issues—looking through the results from each World Championship or marathon major will likely involve “and then this athlete had her result stripped because of a positive test”. As an observer, it increasingly feels like it is an unsolvable problem. Considering all the smoke signals from the last decade, the very top of elite distance running has become a game of who can dope the most while beating tests. I know some people will say this is a gross overstatement and that many, many athletes are doing incredible things while clean, but come on, did you watch Icarus?
In classic American fashion, the default mode of popular distance running discourse is to assume that everyone else is cheating, but Americans are clean. This is also used as an excuse for Americans not being as successful as runners from other countries. While it is true that doping convictions largely centered around Eastern Europe and East Africa in recent years, it has always been rather absurd to assume that Americans are just superior on the doping front when you think about it for more than three seconds. Considering there was also a spate of doping suspensions in sprinting during the 2000s (Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay), so the infrastructure has definitely always been present. Thus, there is a second layer of discussion that centers around the endless speculation of which top international athletes, American or not, are doping and which are not, which typically leads to endless rounds of accusations and counteraccusations made with little evidence. Depending on where you are, these talks often stray into racism, sexism, ableism, and some good ol’ eugenics.
Alberto Salazar’s downfall in 2019 pretty much cracked the whole thing open for American distance running. Although Nike Oregon Project doping stories had been circulating in the media since 2015, it was the first major American distance running doping suspension in over a decade, and it essentially sent everyone into a frenzy of speculation. There were also a number of pointed statements made by famous runners at Bowerman Track Club like Shalane Flanagan about how it wasn’t surprising and entirely justified.
That long introduction leads us to The Shelby Incident, which has drawn more media attention than anything else at the Olympic Trials to date. I will get into a discussion of Houlihan’s guilt later, but the first thing that sticks out is the way Nike and Bowerman Track Club were able to stage-manage this extremely embarrassing and problematic revelation.
The recent trend in sports media has followed the trend in political and business coverage—turn journalism into a mouthpiece for powerful people to manipulate public opinion for profit while also occasionally giving much more interesting stories and access for precious, life-saving clicks. This trend is more apparent at some places (cough Forbes) than others (I think Reuters is still pretty boring), but never has it been so blatantly abused in distance running than with this Shelby Houlihan Incident.
First off, Houlihan, BTC, and Nike essentially got to announce the doping ban themselves on their own channels. Houlihan also got six months to sit on this positive test (from December 2020) and make arrangements while the appeals process played out (now). By comparison, when steeplechase gold medalist Ruth Jebet was banned for EPO in 2018, she tested positive on February 18 and was given a suspension on March 4 (broken to all media sources immediately). It is rather bizarre that Houlihan’s suspension got buried—when sprinter Christian Coleman got suspended due to whereabouts issues and a missed drug test in June 2020, the news broke before he got a chance to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Houlihan somehow managed to keep a lid on everything until after CAS had upheld her suspension. That doesn’t really make sense.
[I realize that I didn’t even explain what CAS was, so we should back up a bit. As with most PED suspensions, Houlihan’s case quickly descended into a byzantine and confusing legal process. Once she was found in violation by the Athletics Integrity Unit, she appealed to the CAS for exoneration using the burrito excuse. The court ruled against her, so she got suspended.]
Regardless of her actual guilt, AIU and CAS sitting on the news for six months clearly allowed Houlihan and Nike to shape a narrative that really would not have been possible had the suspension dropped a few weeks after the failed test happened in December. Many Twitter commentators have noted this, but no international athlete would ever get such support in the US media given such a ruling, let alone be given the opportunity to control the narrative from the start. With the news coming just before Olympic Trials and the biggest races of her entire career, the first news report about the suspension was Houlihan and Bowerman TC vociferously denying any guilt and making “the Burrito Excuse” the default headline in the media. Houlihan and her coach (Schumacher, if you recall) emotionally read prepared statements via video call exhorting her innocence. This was quickly followed by a clearly coordinated PR blitz from the “Bowerman babes” and the rest of her teammates, as well as Shalane Flanagan and other Nike-affiliated athletes, all of whom went on record to effectively ensure the messaging was “Poor Shelby, she got hosed by the arcane doping rules”.
Of course, that begs the question, was Shelby hosed by the arcade doping rules? Ughhhhhhh, this is no fun to get into, but I think it’s what people care about, so I’ll indulge them. Comparing sports legal dramas to real-life legal dramas is always dangerous, but it can be reasonably asserted that the Athletics Integrity Unit are the cops/judges, CAS is the final court of appeal, and athletes are the defendants. As with most law enforcement systems, the Athletics Integrity Unit, WADA, USADA, and every other acronymed anti-doping body are not perfect and riddled with idiosyncrasies, politicization, and biases. As with most large sporting governing bodies, you generally don’t want to be on their side with anything. There are many difficult and stressful rules about whereabouts and restrictions that would drive most people insane. Their rules are often inconsistently enforced and change arbitrarily. Nobody likes them. But, let’s be fair, dealing with the doping cops is a major part of being an elite athlete in an era where rigorous drug testing has been the norm for decades. Passing drug tests is part of the game, and given recent scandals, it’s hard to find much public sympathy if these places can scientifically assert you violated doping protocols.
Given the evidence, I think it’s fair to say that Houlihan failed the drug test according to the cops’ rules. For one, she tested positive for 5 nanograms of nandrolone, which is double the WADA-established limit of 2.5 nanograms. Her “authentic Mexican food truck” explanation, which, according to LetsRun and her lawyer, involved her eating a “carne asada burrito” that had been in close contact with potentially tainted pork at this Beaverton food truck, was clearly not legally sufficient for either AIU or CAS to clear her of wrongdoing. In addition, almost all pigs in the US are castrated, and you can apparently only get a false positive for this steroid by eating meat from an uncastrated pig. Personally, I also don’t find the burrito excuse sufficient enough to be believable, although I am interested in seeing what the AIU says about the case in a few months.
(There’s a pretty good Twitter thread from Steve Magness about the technical details of this here which makes it very clear that Houlihan’s lawyers have entirely rested her defense on the offal boar meat explanation.
There’s also another good thread by actual experts on why the boar meat scenario in the US is pretty implausible.)
But look at it from the AIU/CAS perspective, even if her arguments were good (hair samples seemed clean, she had no history of doping in her hair samples, she’d even refused to use the shady Nike super-spikes for competition in 2020), if they let this case go through, then every single person who gets busted for nandrolone (which happens often) could say that they ate bad meat. In fact, a Kenyan runner named James Kibet had actually tried to give the pig meat excuse for nandrolone in February 2021, going as far to take a video of pigs in Kenya to show the doping cops that his levels were legal. Is that story any more believable than Houlihan’s? Probably not! Kibet’s suspension has also been upheld.
Unlike the case of sprinter Jarrion Lawson, who tested positive for a banned substance and did get exonerated on a tainted meat excuse, Houlihan was unable to find the meat supplier who gave her tainted meat. She was able to provide a receipt for the food truck, but per her lawyer’s comments, it’s hard to even maintain that she would’ve had enough pork meat to have the steroid in her system. So, if I’m being honest, it’s pretty hard to see a “no-fault” case here, but I think even if she got some other tainted supplement or another no-fault positive, it’s pretty lame to go with the burrito excuse in my book.
Houlihan has also made several rather disingenuous arguments thus far. The first one centers around the test’s sensitivity. She argued in her statement that having such a low limit for nandrolone makes it likely that innocent athletes like her could trip the test, yet a) nandrolone has been used for a very long time and the tests have been repeatedly refined so that nanograms can be detected, in fact, Victor Conte of BALCO went on record to say that nandrolone is so easily detected that he advises not using it b) if the test were that sensitive, you’d see way more athletes getting popped for nandrolone after eating bad pork. Next, we have the “but nandrolone doesn’t even affect performance” argument, which just doesn’t really add up because plenty of distance runners have been caught using it, and, frankly, adding muscle mass generally leads to a performance boost, no matter what you’re doing. Her coach claiming he’s never heard of the drug in his life is also pretty sus.
I’m not even sure any of this matters, though. You can go on for days speculating on what happened or trying to figure out who to believe. You can go eat a bunch of boar tissue and test yourself for steroids afterward. You can even do a Sally Jenkins and get the Washington Post to publish an op-ed saying that, effectively, anti-doping controls are inherently biased against non-Europeans with very little factual evidence. You can go full Distance Running QAnon and bury yourself in conspiracies on the LetsRun forums about whether she was on some other supplement that got tainted or whether she was a super-doper all along or whatever.
What matters is that this entire thing suckssssssssss big time! On all levels! Even as a cynical jerk who has begrudgingly come to the conclusion that many top runners are “legally doping” in some way, this entire situation just reminds me how much this sport sucks.
Doping is in a strange zone for morality and ethics. On one hand, it is definitely cheating and as a former semi-competitive runner, I resent anyone who ever doped and took away from "clean” athletes. On the other hand, given how complex and sophisticated “legal doping” and other sports science and technology efforts have gotten, I’m increasingly seeing it as a kind of “rule” that I shouldn’t feel as emotional about. Maybe it’s like sign-stealing in baseball, illegal and unethical, but ultimately how things are done. That being said, repeatedly bragging and championing yourself as a clean program and getting every single journalist who will give you air time to repeat that you are clean despite this VERY SHADY incident is extremely lame.
Part of your job as an athlete or coach is to make sure you pass tests. Whatever happened with Shelby, there’s been some big messup, and that is lame. Galen Rupp, a famous runner who most people think doped because of his connection to Alberto Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project, has never failed a drug test. If you are doping, the least you can do is pass all the tests. If you are clean, you should really, really be passing tests! And I understand the legal system is messed up and that an innocent athlete being punished is bad, but these aren’t murder cases! This is pretty far from a subjective referee decision! They tell you all the rules in advance and then have a clearly defined testing process! It’s not a no-knock warrant or some BS civil asset forfeiture situation. There are many people who are getting screwed over right now who have far, far fewer resources and foreknowledge of how criminal justice is going to screw them.
Shelby Houlihan was someone who I genuinely looked up to in the past. But going all-in on the “authentic Mexican burrito” excuse reeks. Sorry. She wasn’t the poster child of anti-doping or anything, but it’s kinda lame. Sorry.
It’s egregious how much we let the shoe companies and the USATF throw their weight around to manipulate the discussion. While it turned out to be a minor blip, the eight hours in which the USATF tried to let Houlihan race at Trials in spite of every single international and American rule against letting suspended athletes race was…disgusting. And Nike being able to control the narrative from the get-go serves as a particularly awful template for media relations going forward. I’m surprised no baseball players ever tried this during the steroid era, just get you and all of your friends to make joint statements about how great of a person you are, then tell every media person that likes you to make sure to say there’s “reasonable doubt”. Of course, getting to completely preempt the governing bodies helps in that regard.
The media outlets, particularly some of the big newspaper talking heads and LetsRun, treating this as if it’s some 50/50 outcome or even rather likely that she was false-positived really strains my patience. The probability that the burrito excuse is real starts around 1%. The odds that it was a false positive or some other no-fault issue are not much greater. This has been mentioned by many people, but if her last name were Cheruiyot or Shevchenko, we wouldn’t be here.
One of the things I dislike most about mass media is how millions of people get parachuted into a niche sport with zero knowledge or context about anything and then get a free pass when they make awful, awful takes. This recently occurred with the Naomi Osaka French Open experience, but somehow this Houlihan Incident is way worse because. For one, what the media is being attuned to is way, way worse than missing a press conference. For another, the fact that they have all bought into this Nike PR narrative is vomit-inducing. Nobody forced them to blindly listen to the guy who has “never heard of nandrolone” despite working in track for his entire life!
There has to be a middle ground here, right? Like, it’s not fair to just have the media blindly reporting what the doping cops say when it comes to East African athletes, but we also shouldn’t have the media blindly reporting the team’s statement without any recourse, right? Like, one of the most prominent track journalist probably shouldn’t be posting op-eds claiming total innocence based on being friends with the accused, right? We shouldn’t be letting journalists off the hook from lapping up doping claims in the past and then questioning this one because they like Jerry Schumacher, right? If the legal authority is proven without a shadow of a doubt to be demonstrably corrupt and biased, then go off! FIFA corruption? Qatari worker corruption? Sure, I’ll take it. Believing that the entirety of world doping controls are ruined because your buddies got popped is gonna require some serious evidence, and more than “this one highly respected organic chemist who has testified hundreds of times, including against Landis and others, who I dubiously claim to have lied in a separate case after listening to an agent as the sole source, is back again giving evidence here, so maybe it’s shady, but otherwise, you know, sometimes they do good work and I respect them”. If you are trying to play both sides, get stuffed! Also, the community seems to be pretty united that this case was handled properly anyway!
Maybe this was dumb, but I genuinely thought the Bowerman TC folks were pretty cool. Unfortunately, this may not be the case! That sucks! In hindsight, I realize why some people were salivating to watch them fall apart, but I think that’s also a bad attitude.
Okay, I still can’t believe she made sure to emphasize that it was an “authentic Mexican food truck” aaaahahahaaaa
Why do the Swiss get the final say on everything? What did they do to deserve that, and why do I just accept that?
Can’t help thinking that the steep decline in track’s popularity and recognition has made all of this so much worse. If they tried to do that canned statement and PR blitz in a sport like baseball or basketball, it would never, ever work. Similarly, if the doping agencies tried to get away with some of their draconian stuff with a players’ union, they’d get told to get lost.
Holy shit have there been a lot of asshole men making comments online about women’s physiques as if they have any fucking clue what they’re talking about…that sucks too…this all sucks so much…
In conclusion, we have learned very little, the sport continues to look tarnished, we’ve all forgotten about the exciting races that are supposed to happen, and everyone is mad. Did you know that Ryan Crouser broke the world record in the shot put yesterday? Is anyone still reading this? Hello?
