Alison Wade either wants no talk about Shelby Houlihan besides her own, thinks Houlihan didn't dope, or both

The insistence on making Shelbo a special case suggests that pro distance running needs both worthier idols and a more discerning congregation

After Shelby Houlihan, banned from the sport of track and field for a doping offense until January 2025, earned $500 for winning a half-marathon in Iowa in late July, a man named Jamie Langley tweeted out the race results and in doing so “alerted” the U.S. and worldwide anti-doping authorities to Houlihan’s participation. Since Houlihan had apparently made no announcement that she would be racing, the fact that she had done so and won money in the process naturally made observers curious whether Houlihan had compounded her existing woes by committing another offense.

Since the half-marathon didn’t bear the official imprimatur of U.S.A. Track and Field, she was evidently in the clear there. But Alison Wade, the delightfully charismatic writer of the Fast Women newsletter, was unhappy with the fact that Langley was “trying to get Shelby Houlihan in trouble” despite admitting being too lazy to investigate the applicable rules herself.

Wade made this complaint in a private Facebook group—one that, if Wade had complete gatekeeping control, would be limited to people who never disagree with a word she says or an idea she holds. But sadly, there are moles tucked away in even the most inhospitable online quarters.

After I circulated it, Alan Abramson of 3 Wire Sports dedicated an article to the media’s astonishingly soft treatment of Houlihan, who stands alone among recently “convicted” track-and-field dopers in being broadly treated in the United States as innocent—even and largely by people who privately believe otherwise. Abramson’s article included the screen shot above, collected from my post about Wade’s “private” tantrum on July 27.

Surprisingly, Wade left a comment.

This response demonstrates why the Wokish overwhelmingly favor cowardly non-engagement over childish bitching and deflection in these kinds of scenarios: As bad as the first look is, the second is invariably worse. The cover-up in the case of a clear Oops! like Wade’s Facebook-group yapping never fails to compound the crime.

Every element of Wade’s comment is either bullshit or nonsense, meaning that everything she typed was either insincere or just noncontributory babbling. The complaint that Abramson didn’t reach out to her before publishing is both bullshit and nonsense, because Wade routinely demonizes people without contacting them—we* could start with Jamie Langley, although her participation in the attempted cancellation of Gary Cantrell still represents her and other running pundits’ most egregious dive into aggravated assholery—and it’s nonsensical to pretend a conversation between Wade and Abramson would have produced anything besides a demand from the former for the latter motherfucker to write nothing at all.

Wade seems to harbor the childlike belief that if you say something you clearly mean, but your words reach unintended ears, then you meant those words differently, or something. (In case anyone is really confused, what the rules say about a banned athlete competing in her sport is independent of who’s discussing those rules; you don’t have to know the details of any rule to know this much.) And she says she’s all for alerting the proper authorities when people break rules, but that she had good reason to think Houlihan hadn’t done so at the time of her Facebook post. Yet that post contained an explicit admission that Wade was ignorant of the rules.

Also, as Abramson patiently points out, you can’t “get someone” serving a ban “in trouble” for reporting behavior that turns out to have no impact on that person’s suspension. Maybe Wade things that because people like her have been largely successful in gaslighting the public into swallowing the insane idea that males identifying as females are females in every biological way—something else she’d say she never said—she worries that people like Jamie Langley are intent on somehow Jedi-mind-tricking the World Anti-Doping Agency into unjustifiably extending Houlihan’s suspension by a few years. But I doubt it. I smell more bullshit than nonsense in Wade’s “I was just worried about someone serving up a nothingburger” claim.

“I agree that that’s a massive loophole that shouldn’t exist” seems to refer to Houlihan being able to race at all and win money in the process, but as she notes two sentences earlier, she’s not great at wording things, so I’m not sure. But assuming this is the case, well, if Wade thinks banned dopers shouldn’t have the option Shelbo made hay of, why did she signal the harridans in her Facebook group to put Langley on their shit-lists and maybe give him a Twitter love-tap, too? And while Wade skips over that part in her comment, there’s no more charitable way to interpret the link to Langley’s tweet and Wade’s accompanying wording; she wasn’t saying “Hey, thus guy makes a great follow!”

Wade’s “it's also completely misrepresentative to say that I don't care about doping in sports” is absolute bullshit, at least when it comes to Houlihan. As I noted in a response to Wade’s whining—and I can’t link directly to 3 Wire Sports comments, so much of what’s below is just cut-and-pasted—the June 18, 2021 edition of the Fast Women newsletter included these words:

• "They never lied about it in the press conference, they just chose their words carefully ... A mixed-up order has happened to all of us."

• "I think it was premature to choose a side."

• "It’s been painful to see people jumping to conclusions, because there are a lot of facts to consider, and we don’t have all of them yet."

• "There’s a good chance we will never have satisfactory answers in this case."

• "Houlihan has supportive teammates. Emily Infeld, Vanessa Fraser, Chris Derrick, Courtney Frerichs, Karissa Schweizer, Elise Cranny, Sinclaire Johnson, Woody Kincaid, Lopez Lomong, and Evan Jager are among those who posted heartfelt messages in support of Houlihan ... what I see are sincere messages of support from people who have run thousands of miles with her."

• "Regardless of the truth, when I watched that press conference, I saw people who were in shock and hurting and I have sympathy for them."

At this point, Shelby Houlihan was five months into a four-year suspension. Anyone who was even sitting on the fence at this stage was some combination of credulous to the point of foolishness and biased to the point of blindness.

Wade actually claimed that it was premature to accept that Houlihan was already suspended, had kept that fact a secret for four months as she tried to appeal, and was now offering a story that would have been immediately drawn nothing but gales of laughter in the U.S. had it come from a non-American. She ceded any claim to being a serious pundit at that stage, even if she had a lot of cross-eyed, open-mouthed company.

She also gave herself away with her use of the word "satisfactory." In what world does reality always or even often align with "satisfactory"? See also: "Regardless of the truth." Wade shouldn't be so dismissive of the truth so often. Believing a lie is why she targeted Cantrell for boycotting, and it's why she’s a part of this amazing collective media pretension to Houlihan’s innocence.

And yet amid all this "hold on a sec, we don’t have all the facts" nonsense, Wade had the gall to throw an "even I don’t know where I stand on it" in that newsletter, evidently expecting people outside her bubble of raging misandrists and stealth-misogynists to believe this lip-service to fence-sitting.

Attempting to reconcile Wade’s various claims with her inner beliefs leads to an Escherian chase around the rim of a chimney. If she wants people punished for breaking rules, why be against reporting potential infractions? Why assert confidence in a non-infraction while simultaneously asking for guidance on what constitutes an infraction? Why discourage talk of whatever Houlihan is up to when Wade herself has routinely mentioned the disruptive-in-semi-exile athlete?

If there is any coherent picture emerging from this, it’s that Wade thinks Houlihan didn’t put banned substances into her body on purpose or that a Montreal anti-doping lab either made a bunch of mistakes or invented a positive test. It’s hard to see any other way to parse her insistence that others leave Houlihan alone amid her claims that she cares about doping, or to be exact, that “it’s completely misrepresentative to say that (Wade doesn’t) care about doping in sports”—yet another wishy-washy bit of waaaaah.

Maybe she wants male dopers banned, but not women dopers. If Wade doesn’t want people putting words in her mouth, she should stop contradicting herself. But she is an established blunt-force hypocrite in all manner of ways, so that won’t be happening.

I have obviously fallen outside the consensus media position that Americans should dope if they can get away with it because the rest of the world does the same thing. That emergent consensus is upsetting for a number of reasons.

One is that even if someone wants to argue that at the pro level, everyone has to dope just to keep up, there’s no way to ignore the cascading effects of any slide in the direction of doping tolerance. If kids understand that doping at the highest level of sport is more obligatory than episodic—something most of them have, I think, so far been mostly shielded from—then more kids will start doping themselves. Whatever potions anyone wants are available online given money and the right kind of grim persistence and a semi-sociopathic commitment to rising above your peers.

There is no doubt that some doping is already happening in college and even high school; the cash value of a college athletic scholarship rises by the year, and if kids are cheating academically—often with parental management—then they’re cheating on playing fields, too. The more this feels “wrong, but still okay” instead of just wrong, the more kids will succumb. And the drugs people use to get better at sports can be very dangerous. I think people underestimate not just the multi-systemic physical maladies androgenic steroids can inflict in the long and short term, but also the increased level of ambient rage and the potential for violence that widespread steroid use dumps on society.

The way the entire media has complied with Nike’s narrative about Houlihan is also part of an unending cascade of bullshit from the media at large. Caught dopers have been making up excuses ever since rules against using certain chemicals were created and tests for enforcing them designed and implemented; everyone expects that. But in the past, I could expect pushback against ridiculous excuses, especially from people in the know. And the absence of this is yoked to an absence of skepticism on the part of the cable-viewing and Facebook-trolling public about various untrue narratives emerging from the White House, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, Foggy Bottom, and the usual places where the real work of fucking over the world with nonsense and bullshit gets done.

Every source of irritation I experience from the running world is compounded by knowing that the unchallenged bullshit there is owed to a startling collapse of the media, period—a sundering of shared reality and no serious attempt by “the people” to fight the sources of that sundering. None of the clowns I regularly berate first- or second-hand have any impetus to be anything besides their dishonest, crybaby, personal-agenda-driven selves, because we’re even more in it just for ourselves than ever.