"No one would do something that dumb" is the smart crowd's favorite stupid claim
The lingering push-back against the Houlihan verdict ignores both history and everything we know about human nature, including our own
When news that Shelby Houlihan was serving a four-year doping suspension was finally cleared for release, five full months into her ban, one of the rationales advanced in her belated defense by devastated members of the American running public was some version of, “She wouldn’t have used a drug like nandrolone, because duh!”
The main thrust of the “duh” is that oral nandrolone is both far less effective and far more easily detected than other established performance-enhancers. The “free Shelbo” argument around this makes one concession (people cheat) at the expense of another (that people can be irrational) and takes the general form “Sure, people cheat, but they’re savvier about it; even the ones who get caught use better drugs and delivery methods.”
Because the media’s initial focus was the particulars of Houlihan’s “The burrito did it” story, with pundits almost unanimously eager to accept her already litigated fable-of-woe, the angle about Houlihan’s intelligence—not her ethics, but her basic judgment and reasoning power—got relatively little play.
As it should have. The statement “No world-class athlete would make so risky a decision when it comes to doping because X” immediately falls apart no matter what statement is substituted for X. Athletes who face the ongoing, significant possibility of being randomly drug-tested have been testing positive for drugs since anti-doping efforts began, often to the tune of the rest of their careers. And more to the point, not one of their excuses has made anyone think, “Goddamn Winston Einstein himself couldn’t have said it better.”
In an earlier post about the Houlihan circus, I touched on the trotting out of this theme in a Letsrun.com story by Jon Gault. One week after Houlihan ‘fessed up to being dormant all year not to protect her health but because she was ineligible to compete, David Epstein said in an interview with Slate that he doesn’t believe Houlihan would have intentionally ingested nandrolone. Why? Because “taking it orally would be very rare, and the stupidest thing you could possibly take” and that nandrolone is “a substance that everyone knows not to take on purpose anymore.”
But Epstein, who played a major role in the investigation of the Nike Oregon Project, rejects the burrito story, too, leaving him to speculate that some source of contamination was to blame. Perhaps Epstein was then unaware of the levels of nandrolone metabolites in Houlihan’s sample, or maybe he doesn’t see them as significant, either of which would be strange. But regardless, he’s shaking his head at the very idea that a world-class athlete would be silly enough to use an easily obtained, painlessly introducible, comparatively safe testosterone derivative that’s been on the market for decades.
On Sept. 16 Malcolm Gladwell, who has made a career he never planned on from being intellectually dishonest in a thoughtful way, gave the “Come the fuck on now!” theme an injection of windy gravitas, and in the process revived the idea that U.S. running pundits are desperate to believe—that the Houlihan case still isn’t really over. (Not that it matters, but Gladwell is Canadian.)
Like Epstein, Gladwell thinks Houlihan’s burrito story is preposterous. He also admits that everything in the CAS report makes sense to him. But that’s not sufficient to convince him of Houlihan’s core culpability.
Why? Gladwell laments:
[W]hen I look at the Houlihan case, I continue to believe that the case against her requires not a code or a technical account, but a story.
No. Gladwell himself requires a story, because that’s how he has always operated, often to illuminating or at least entertaining effect. But this far different from believing that a “satisfying” account in fact exists. He expends a few paragraphs drawing connections between the Houlihan case and a 2006 book by a Columbia University sociology professor about decision-making. Treating this work as if it is grounded in the same testable and reproducible principles as analytical chemistry, Gladwell waves it around as if its theses describe how people will invariably behave, given a known, fixed set of variables.
Given the sum of their beliefs about the available evidence and human nature, both Epstein and Gladwell come down on the side of Houlihan telling an unbelievable story not because she was guilty of purposefully doping, but because she was guilty of accidentally ingesting a contaminated product of some sort and couldn’t account for it.
First: People, including the brightest ones you’ve met, do objectively dumb things all the time. To start to list examples would be to begin writing the entire hilarious and sad encyclopedia of human history. Anyone who believes that thinking people are incapable of doing exceptionally ill-advised things, given the right psychological and external incentives, should go to a week’s worth of A.A. meetings, where you’ll hear clear-eyed folks a lot brighter than Shelby Houlihan own up to behavior that makes the cast of Jackass! look like a cadre of world-renowned astrophysicists.
Second: Attempts on their or anyone’s part to portray Houlihan as a sound decision-maker themselves make no sense. Are these observers aware of how dumb it was for Shelby Houlihan to say, in so many words, that she didn’t want to race in superspikes because it was unfair to others? To anyone without a smidgen of learned discernment, she already looked like a doper. A “smart” response would have been something like, well, they’re still working on a custom spike model for me or the mechanics just don’t seem right, but Jerry and I are exploring options with the technical people. Something not thoroughly boneheaded, at least.
Third: It’s easy to judge a potentially career-ending course of action as dumb when the perpetrator has already been exposed, which by definition is the only time we* learn about these purportedly foolish undertakings while an athlete is still active. It’s easy to decide after someone is nabbed doing something unwise that this was the inevitable result. This is shoddy thinking.
Finally, is it really even that dumb to take nandrolone, or any drug, in any form, at any time, and hope or even expect to fully get away with it? If you’re Nike’s star professional American distance runner of the moment, at least?
Gladwell plaintively asks:
Is she in fact really stupid—like, really stupid? Or, alternatively, was there some deeper reason why she would have behaved with such reckless desperation?
It’s easy to miss the second, smart question here, the answer to which is “Maybe she wasn’t as worried about the consequences of being caught as people automatically suspect.”
And that leads into the heart of point four: Perhaps “arrogant” is the word that’s eluding these pundits. Maybe Houlihan had good reasons to believe she could get away with things others could not. It looks like she’d already been evading the cheats for a few years as it was.
Ask yourself: Of athletes you know of who have been suspended for doping violations, how many of them, based on their performances, appear to have been running clean up until the moment they were flagged? If you need help, slowly hum the words Lance Armstrong to yourself as you think it over.
I don’t know if Gladwell being viewed as an authority on the sport stems more from his reputation as an at-large analytical thinker or more from his status as fairly fast coot with an unlikely hairdo. But treating this piece as anything other than what its headline admits it to be—a wish for reality to be different—would be unwarranted no matter its provenance.
But anyway, if feelings matter, which is what the desire for a “story” really is, doesn’t a glance at Shelby Houlihan’s progression starting at age 26 matter, too? This is among the main things running journalists should have emphasized—the few who have the background to put the pieces together, that is, and most of the loudest and proudest ones, being the stupidest as well, don’t. In fact, even before Houlihan was caught, she looked extremely suspicious.
Houlihan graduated from high school in 2011 with a 4:43.6 personal best for a full mile, having competed since her freshman year. When she turned pro four years later, she’s dropped her mile time to 4:28.71 (worth 4:08.80 over 1,500 meters) and held a 5,000-meter best of 15:49.72.
At the end of 2017, after two years as a pro, Houlihan’s personal bests stood at 4:03.39 (achieved in 2016), 8:37.40 for 3,000 meters and 15:00.37 for 5,000 meters. Those times are internally consistent enough, with the 1,500 meters being a little slow. It was in 2018 that Houlihan started really opening eyes, jumping all the way to 3:57.34 and 14:34.45, the latter mark an American record. 2019 saw her take the AR in the shorter event with a 3:54.99. The next year brought an 8:26.66 indoors and an improvement on her outdoor 5,000-meter AR to 14:23.93.
Experienced observers understand that once someone has been training and racing under professional guidance for a decade, and then makes a jump from being one of the faster Americans in the mix to the kinds of times Houlihan reached, there is no benign explanation, other than maybe Houlihan having undiagnosed anemia until 2018.
The idea that Houlihan was doping was out there already. Technically, though, despite the way her career ended, the claim that she used nandrolone to reach the level she did is indeed shaky—if you interpret this claim as “used nandrolone alone.” That various members of the Bowerman Track Club have been merrily cheating for the past few years is obvious if you believe that doping is endemic, and if you believe what coaches of teams like the BTC believe is necessary to win, which is Jerry Schumacher’s job now just as much as it used to be Alberto Salazar’s.
I don’t think anyone should intentionally try to make pro running seem joyless by hammering continuously at the “They’re all using something” message. But when so many members of the media have conspicuously bent over backward (making it easier to jab a hand up your own ass) to look for reasons Houlihan could be clean—an idea put out there by Nike lawyers and PR flacks not to help Shelbo but to legitimize the efforts of the un-caught but suddenly exposed, it becomes a lot more tempting for non-nationalistic U.S. observers to wonder why yellow and red flags haven’t been flying all around athletes like Karissa Schweizer, Evan Jager, Colleen Quigley and various others since the advent of superspikes in late 2019 gave people even more of an excuse to dope, especially when COVID-19 threw the world into disarray months later.
In a running-media environment resembling baseball’s or football’s, those flags would indeed be everywhere. But owing partly to other sports being far more of a journalistic talent draw than running and partly to running’s small scale, this is unlikely to occur. (I hope it’s clear that I’m not claiming to know anything more for a fact than other observers do. But it's easy to recognize occasions when asking hard questions is warranted, sometimes to the point where not asking those questions represents not sloppiness but journalistic malfeasance.)
Those who make covering distance running their life’s work, even people who appear take substantive anti-doping stances on occasion, are obligated to play dumb about doping to a certain, considerable extent. One reason is that getting too real about what a drugged-up mess professional track and field and road racing really is makes for a poor marketing strategy. If you are as attuned to the reality of doping as reality compels you to be, shining a constant spotlight of suspicion on every incredible performance would not only discourage the masses from following along, but also start to make you dislike your own job, or at least enjoy it less. And if pro running all but goes away in a massive poof of scandal thanks to exposing the bad guys, well, then what comes next in life?
But the bigger reason is more obvious. Let’s say that someone who does legitimate running journalism—and no one currently working for the corporate running media qualifies, as merely covering events as they arise is not close to the same thing—had reacted to the news that Houlihan had been banned by immediately asking suspicious questions about the BTC as a whole.
After all, had Houlihan been, say, a high-profile Moroccan or Spaniard in a celebrated overseas training camp, at least some members of the American running media would have wanted to know a lot more about the busted runner’s teammates, especially the ones who had made similar, essentially inexplicable performance jumps in similar time frames. We* would be laughing at the straight-faced denials, at the way Nike managed to embargo the news of the ban itself for months, and armchair statisticians would be running the numbers as coldly as I did above.
But supposing it even occurred to anyone outside of Letsrun.com—which, by the way, was not founded with the intent of doing deep running journalism, but which now performs almost all of what little of it remains—to investigate this vis a vis the BTC, such a thing is just not going to happen. Running is too small an enterprise for a media professional to get away with muckraking, however legitimate, and not suffer immediate consequences in the form of losing access. If your professional life depended on being able to talk to BTC athletes, would you ask a single one of its members a truly difficult question? Even an aggressive reporter would be well screwed here.
No one with formal journalism training, ambition, and talent would settle on covering running as a career for obvious reasons. It is and will always remain a tiny slice of the sports market, meaning you won’t make the amount of money or reach the number of people a bona fide egomaniac with literary flair would demand. On top of that, the corporate media as a whole, despite raking in fantastic profits, has been bleeding genuine reporting and editing jobs for a long time, as anyone who’s been in the industry for a couple of decades or more is completely disillusioned by the shift to a fake-news model no matter the politics at hand or the subjects in play.
Whereas all corners of journalism once rejected the ignorant, the half-literate, the lazy, and the spineless, today’s hand-job-happy environment is tailor-made for a freewheeling moron like Chris Chavez, who can compensate for a lack of basic knowledge, thinking power, integrity, running ability, and literacy with sheer ass-kissing, not just to the scumlords like Phil Knight he pleasures via his interviews but the blinkered masses who make up most of his thousands-strong fan base.
But while Chavez is an open-face suckup, and characters like Erin Strout are too stupid to know the difference, there remain understandable reasons that even those in the media who are cagier about doping and more emboldened humans in general are hesitant to, as the slogan goes, help keep running great again by looking under the hood of its largest and most powerful machine. That said, it would be nice to see more to offset the obligatory pro-Houlihan—and hence pro-Nike-doping—chum that gives running fans something to yap about between the end of the DL and the onset of a weird crunch of fall U.S. marathons.