Ross Tucker's analysis corrected multiple myths and misconceptions about the Houlihan case
We* also need to move past ideas like "He never ate anyone in front of me, so his athletes would never dope"
Letsrun recently asked Ross Tucker to write an analysis of the decision by the Court of Arbitration for sport (CAS) to suspend American distance megastar Shelby Houlihan for four years for a doping violation, with nandrolone cited as the offending substance. The gang’s primary motivation was to see whether Tucker’s interpretations of the court’s decision-making process could resolve questions they and others in the running community have had since the CAS released its 44-page “full reasoned decision” last August.
These skeptics’ main outstanding questions were: Did the CAS not follow its own published policies in declining to perform certain tests that might have led to a different outcome? Why, ultimately, did World Athletics reject the claim that Houlihan’s urinary levels of a specific nandrolone metabolite came from ingesting steroid-“tainted” food, given that false doping positives can clearly occur by this mechanism? Isn’t nandrolone produced in the body as well, possibly introducing confusion into the lab tests? And does one of the experts whose input helped seal Houlihan’s fate have a record of corruption—particularly in the very area of steroid-contaminated samples?
Tucker, in my judgment, was able to put these concerns to rest straightforwardly, though I’m not sure at this stage how many of those who managed to remain convinced of Houlihan’s innocence into 2022 would be swayed by anything less than 1,000-frames-per-second video evidence of Houlihan introducing nandrolone or a precursor into her system. After all, by the end of summer, even highly regarded public intellectuals whose job is to ruthlessly document the consequences of deliberate human behavior, and who have watched the world rapidly grow dumber (or, to be pointlessly blasé about it, more intellectually balkanized) in recent years, were left with “No one would be that stupid” as their strongest means of sweeping aside the possibility that Houlihan went totally rogue and became one of the first distance runners in history to seek a nominally forbidden competitive edge and hope that the rewards outweighed the risks.
Nothing about Shelby Houlihan suggests that she is stupid. But nothing about the world—especially the elite sports world—suggests that questionable risks are the sole purview of jittery thinkers.
Tucker first explains why Houlihan’s claim that the testing lab didn’t follow proper procedures was wrong—either intentionally or because she didn’t understand these procedures, she was operating on a branch of a decision tree the characteristics of her urine sample left her ineligible to occupy. The reason: Lab testing showed that the nandrolone metabolites found in Houlihan’s urine were significantly different from metabolites of her own endogenously (internally) produced steroids, in this case using pregnanediol as a reference hormone.
This kind of personalized standardization is done using carbon-isotope analysis. (Briefly, living things organisms take up 12C in preference to 13C, which has one more neutron in its nucleus than 12C and makes up about 1 percent of carbon on Earth. The ratio between these two carbon isotopes in a sample helps determine whether the sample is of biological origin. Those interested in diving into the fascinating weeds of radiometric dating, another application of isotope analysis, should check this out.)
Because the difference between the 13C signatures of the 19-NA and the pregnanediol in Houlihan’s urine samples (“A” and “B”) was greater than 3 percent—and this is a slight but forgivable abuse of the actual math involved—this not only definitionally precluded the step Houlihan was lobbying for and claiming the rules entitled her to, a pharmacokinetics test, but it also triggered an automatic suspension via an Adverse Analytical Finding, or ADRV, rather than resulting in an Atypical Athlete Finding, or AAF.
Think of it this way: You’re someone who learns that everyone who graduated from college in Arizona and has run under five minutes for the mile is eligible for a cash prize. But after you submit your documentation, you realize you didn’t read the fine print, which says that anyone from Iowa is not only ineligible for the prize but can be charged with fraud for applying from the benefit if found to have ties to the Hawkeye State. Whether Houlihan’s team knew the real rules and was hoping for a miracle or whether they were legitimately confused is of course unknown.
Of course, the logic in stopping the analytical process after observing the >3 percent difference is less whimsical: This figure essentially ruled out endogenous nandrolone production. It meant that Houlihan was suspended unless and until she could establish that the nandrolone that had ventured into her body from an external source had gotten there by accident.
Tucker then moves on to the burrito that forms the entirety of Houlihan’s substantive defense. He grants that she could have eaten a pork burrito rather than the beef burrito she ordered. But from there, everything goes to shit.
Here is where I start to speculate about Houlihan’s mindset when she learned she had been suspended, and—I guess I need to say it— all of my speculation in this post is predicated on the assumption that she was consciously doping. I figure she had seen multiple athletes successfully beat a doping rap by showing that they had eaten something that could have produced a sham positive. She, like a lot of runners, had a burrito habit. Surely there was hope to be found in something purchased from a sketchy authentic Mexican food truck.
Houlihan probably knew, or rapidly found out via Googling, that certain kinds of meat in the American food supply contained levels of anabolic hormones sufficient to result in false positive doping tests. She probably didn’t know that only certain parts of certain boars could result in elevated levels of urinary 19-NA, and only then when consumed in rapacious amounts. What she surely didn’t know, like almost everyone alive, is that it is possible to geographically trace the specific origins of agricultural products such as hogs based on the diets of the eventually slaughtered animals.
Most followers of this saga are probably aware that Houlihan’s claim of having eaten uncastrated boar meat was extremely shaky because of the sheer amount of stank organ meat she would have had to have ingested (all while thinking she was eating pork stomach, but TBH if that has been me, I wouldn’t have known the difference if I were hungry or high enough, and in Oregon I would be both). They also may know that virtually none of this meat exists in the American food supply. But they probably didn’t know that a positive result from American-raised boar meat would produce a different 13C signature from the one Houlihan’s urine showed.
If you stack (multiply) the individual probabilities of the events Houlihan needed to be true for her defense to be accepted as actually being true, this results in odds that might as well be zero. Geoffrey Burns, also known for explaining why indoor tracks can be so fast, explains this in comments to a Twitter thread Tucker started to alert his followers to his new article.
When Tucker refuses to speak in absolutes in his Q-&-A with Letsrun, he is speaking as a scientist: There is a nonzero chance Houlihan is innocent, however slim the odds. I speak this way when someone asks me if I believe in any of the gods on offer. I don’t, and the individual stories look so ridiculous in the light of modernity that I can safely dismiss them as myths. But nothing about modern cosmology or materialism per se is technically incompatible with some kind of sputtering, ramshackle intelligence having set the whole freakshow in motion. I can check “atheist” for purposes of, say, finding an equally morose and desolate Tinder mate, but from a philosophical standpoint I’m an agnostic with a tiny sliver of a pinky-toenail in the door of theism. The rules of evidence demand this concession, but folks are apt to treat such flagrant honesty as lingering doubt, which is almost never the case.
Does anyone else just get depressed thinking about all of this shit? The sad scrambling, the ruin that was quietly moving inexorably toward a bad outcome during the five months Houlihan was trying to make this go away. Even if the outcome was necessary, Houlihan is deviant only in being sidelined for something practically every woman—maybe every single one—who has broken 3:55 for 1,500 meters has done, and that’s operate with a motor supercharged beyond street-legal specifications. If she’s lying about her innocence, it’s really just a single lie, but the more it’s repeated, the more it makes her seem like she’s lying about everything. And this is going to go on for years.
The scientific minutiae of the case thus out of the way, in the Q-&-A, Letsrun went at Tucker hard over the credibility of World Athletics expert Christiane Ayotte, who has been in this business since Christ was (allegedly) in diapers.
In the immediate wake of Houlihan disclosing her suspension last June, Letsrun’s Jon Gault wrote an article in which he stated that Ayotte had provided false testimony in the 2020 case of American sprinter and long-jumper Jarrion Lawson. Gault wrote a scintillating article about how Lawson was cleared.
By last week, Letsrun had softened its stance, not imperceptibly, to “inaccurate testimony.” That means the same thing as “false testimony,” but is less loaded thanks to the vicissitudes of the American legal vernacular.
Tucker responds to this by observing, “It sounds as though the best case one can make is that Ayotte was caught making an inaccurate generalization with significant implications for the initial sanction.” In other words, he feels Ayotte made a significant and unfortunate but ultimately non-lethal error (the appeals process sucks, but exists for a reason), but that her overall credentials are as good as any get and it would be silly to speculate that Christiane Ayotte is either malicious or consistently careless.
Maybe a better way to put it would be, if everyone I know with an important job and decades of experience were sacked for an error of similar scale, a lot of bright, earnest people would be buying groceries with EBT cards (or whatever the Canadian equivalent of food stamps is, probably something involving Tim Horton’s).
Tucker is clearly trying to get the Letsrun gang to cool its jets concerning the chops and intentions of Dr. Ayotte, whose only wrongdoing in this case may have been straying from implicit or even stated directives when helping set in motion the letter bearing ugly news that went out to Shelby Houlihan from World Athletics in January 2021.
You don’t need to understand all of the words in Tucker’s conclusion to grasp how deeply unmoved, to the point of reverse tears, the CAS was by Houlihan’s defense.
CAS has heard all of Houlihan’s arguments, and is not sufficiently convinced by any of them to come close to ruling in her favor. They rule, correctly, that the WADA-accredited lab in Montreal that analysed her finding was not required to perform pharmacokinetic testing because Houlihan’s delta-delta values were not within the endogenous range. The burden then shifted to Houlihan to prove how the nandrolone got in her sample. They agree she ate a burrito on December 14, 2020, maybe even a pork burrito. But CAS doesn’t find it likely that the concentration of nandrolone in her sample could have come from said pork burrito, not just because of the problem of boar meat showing up in the food supply but because the carbon isotope ratio of Houlihan’s sample does not align with what would be expected after consuming boar meat. Houlihan’s fight to prove her innocence is not over – she is appealing CAS’ decision to the Swiss Federal Tribunal – but she faces an uphill battle.
The court of true public opinion is difficult to read. Most true running fans are older and not on Twitter, or if they are it’s only to lurk. I think almost everyone with the sense to understand the variables in play believes that Houlihan not only doped but probably used more than just nandrolone (once you invite the Devil in for a drink, you implicitly leave open the door for all of his guests).
But it’s an easy call to say that most of the U.S. running community still dearly wants Houlihan to be innocent, and is willing to drastically reduce its own collective manifest intelligence to dangerously low levels to maintain this stance.
Lauren Fleshman is a good example of someone who would be better off not needing to express an emphatically unexamined opinion about every contentious idea, because she has a lot of confidence in those opinions, and strongly worded, conflicting statements have a way of accumulating and making relatively cogent thinkers look like idiots.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Fleshman pull this move: “By pointing out my awareness of the ridiculous logic I’m using, I’m avoiding the pitfalls of relying on that logic.” It amounts to a pseudo-intellectual version of “Praying for all involved!” because Lauren Fleshman is implying that she knows things that she cannot possibly know. In fact, if she had the same information I have about some of the BTC’s principal figures from a source I trust—which has nothing to do with doping, but brings to bear directly on serious questions of personal ethics—Fleshman might be whistling a different tune, or keeping those famous lips of hers drier and too tightly sealed. Or she might wait a few more minutes before tweeting. When I was on Twitter, I opined with my gut left and right. Maybe I didn’t engage in a raft of double standards—a refusal to do so, in fact, is basically why many former friends think I’m a right-winger now—but I could make an appalling ass of myself with the best of them. Perhaps I will do this here from time to time, but at least I’m shoving my foot in holes it shouldn’t go with more deliberation now.
Lastly, I want to walk back, with some reluctance, the characterization of Phil Knight’s Hayward Magic project as a Nike propaganda arm. At this point in history, with news organizations being putty in the hands of the government of large corporations, it’s probably fair to take a harder-than-needed stance, because there is no natural floor on immoral behavior that produces rewards—someone has to decide to put one there. And Nike has a de facto control of U.S.A. Track and Field, and has a long and incredibly florid history of breaking and bending rules and people until cultural forces compel them to spray some Lysol in the general direction of the latest problem.
While Chris Chavez is indeed a bonehead and should never have editorial direction over anything, there are some smart people involved with Magic Boost, and although I called Phil Knight an old bastard, he’s an old bastard who still cares about the sport of track and field as he came to know it during Westward Expansion.
Also, I don’t know precisely what this adds, but Shelby Houlihan is a remarkably talented runner. She showed up at Arizona State reportedly having run about 20 miles a week to earn her 4:43 mile. Even when she left ASU—where she had a coach, Louie Quintana, who’s among the most admired in the field and is renowned for being able to work with athletes with a wide range of psychologies and backgrounds. I can’t say for certain, but I bet if you asked him, he might say that Houlihan was 14:30 material anyway. She still had a lot of aerobic love to give when she hit the pro ranks.
Maybe more details will emerge erelong, or years from now. I think it’s possible, maybe even likely, that Jerry Schumacher had no formal knowledge Houlihan was doping, even if he knew what he was seeing. But looking at what the rest of the BTC members have accomplished using the same basic talent substrate Houlihan had to work with—maybe less—sure does make us wonder. Or laugh.
I have no special need to shame people caught doping. I cringe at how some of them react, but I also empathize with where they’re coming from. Until something does something to check the free-for-all centered in Addis Ababa as well as pressure World Athletics to reject the International Olympic Committee’s lead on non-females competing as females, it’s more implied than ever that women who choose not to dope are essentially capping their careers at a suboptimal performance level. That may not be empathy, exactly, but it’s an acknowledgment of how facile it is to sling dung from the sidelines here.
Nevertheless, the media needs to do their job when uncomfortable truths present themselves. That, in theory, one of their most crucial functions; everyday people can sort out emotionally unchallenging stuff for themselves, but in the past, most of the media spared readers no facts even when digging into an unpleasant doping case involving a popular athlete, allowing individual consumers to decide how “sad” or “just” the outcome really was. Those days are long gone, with the media now organizing “facts” around necessary, predetermined narratives founded on the emotional microclimates of the media itself. It’s hard to take solace in the simplistic purity of distance running when, even in that realm, the media can’t describe disruptive events with any reliability.
(Social share photo of cyclist Lance Armstrong confessing his doping sins to Oprah Winfrey in January 2013, almost eight years after his seventh and final Tour de France victory, courtesy of George Burns and Harpo/AP.)