Runner's World's buttressing of Shelby Houlihan is disgusting, but not surprising

The bigger the publication's parent media company, the more shameless the flow of its pro-U.S. propaganda and corporatist cheerleading

American middle-distance runner Shelby Houlihan is now a little over 60 percent of the way through a four-year doping suspension from track and field for testing positive for the steroid nandrolone while avoiding being dinged for whatever other verboten ergogenic junk she was on. Although she began serving her suspension in mid-January of 2021, a month after she submitted a hot urine sample, she and her entire team not only concealed the fact of her suspension but actively lied about it all winter and spring, attributing the American 1,500-meter and 5,000-meter record-holder’s absence from competition leading into that June’s U.S. Championships—which doubled as the 2021 U.S. Olympic Trials—to minor injuries.

In the meantime, Team Shelbo was awaiting a pre-U.S. Championships reprieve from anti-doping authorities that never came, forcing Houlihan and her Bowerman Track Club coaches to stage a Zoom propaganda session for the benefit of a handful of credulous “journalists” who could be counted on to propagate the myth of Houlihan’s innocence.

Spinning yarns about injuries is not how innocent people behave, and neither is delivering news of a doping session only under duress and specifically to cowardly, self-dealing waterheads like Erin Strout, Alison Wade, and Chris Chavez. Besides, anyone who had been following Houlihan’s unlikely post-age-25 career trajectory had no doubt she was juiced well before she admitted she’d been caught; she seems to have tumbled into the dark side in proportion to her personal involvement with Matthew Centrowitz, Jr., a man whom I have learned virtually no track-and-field long-timer trusts farther than Ryan Crouser could throw him.¹

The outrage over Houlihan’s suspension in the U.S. press was universal. Not one major outlet did anything other than push the notion that Houlihan had been wronged. (That no outlet outside the United States was remotely interested in Houlihan’s or her club’s whining should have been telling.) When the Court of Arbitration for Sport released its full decision in August of that year, Letsrun.com published a review of the decision by sports scientist Ross Tucker outlining the reasons the CAS document was, to be gentle, a knockdown argument against all of Houlihan’s patently outlandish claims.

None of the same pundits or outlets that had believed, or at least enthusiastically endorsed, Houlihan’s piggishly offal burrito tale had anything substantive to say about Tucker’s essay or his answers to the questions Letsrun asked him about it. Therefore, it is not surprising that operations run by shambling hypocrites, bias-ravaged Bowerman Track Club e-fellators, and paid-off dung-merchants nationwide have managed to keep mentioning Houlihan in their newsletters and tweets in supportive ways while derogating anyone who questions her presence in running races.

Houlihan set a world record for the beer mile the other day. Undeniably, this is a newsworthy event. The “trick,” which isn’t difficult for people not suffering under the lash of innate or acquired immunity to thinking, is covering an athlete like Houlihan the way she and the facts of her saga deserve.

This is how a proper headline about such an event looks, even if it and the story below it contain errors:

The first sentence, “Shelby Houlihan had not run a public race since 2021 until Saturday afternoon,” is incorrect. Houlihan raced, and won, a small half-marathon a little less than a year ago. When someone on Twitter discovered and posted this, Wade complained about him to the sub-harridans in her “secret” Facebook group.

These people will continue to claim they don’t support doping while making it clear via their every utterance that they very much support doping, at least when Americans are involved (or in Wade’s case, women or men pretending to be women from anywhere on the planet). They need doped runners to make their lives and banal podcasts and newsletters more exciting, whatever the cost.

Runner’s World as an operation is a joke of long standing, though the reasons have evolved over time and will again to suit the latest floor-humping, simpletonian degeneracy on cultural offer. Apart from the articles Sarah Lorge Butler continues to supply, when it comes to anything requiring a spine or any creativity whatsoever, Runner’s World is just crap. This holds true not only on the output side, with Runner’s World adhering strictly to government- and Wokism-driven narratives (which are essentially one and the same) around covid, gender hijinks, “body positivity,” and anti-white racism, but also on the production side, where dirtbag editors can change already published, accurate stories without notifying their authors and replace them with their own mindless, counterfactual, pro-product tripe.

Since 2018, Runner’s World has been owned by Hearst, an ancient media giant that publishes a wealth of garbage aimed at mainly at high-earners, including factless newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle and vanity-compost magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. While plenty of outlets managed by smaller entities (e.g., Fast Women) crank out nonstop lies and fever-dreams borne on spiraling psychic chemtrails of denial and hypocrisy, every single outlet that is owned by a corporate entity is dangerously stupid—its content, its management, its ethics, and whatever counts as its vision.

Accordingly, Runner’s World’s story about Houlihan’s four-lap booze-cruise into the record books wasn’t just tepid but criminally negligent in its belated, reluctant admissions and non-disclosures.

First, the headline is wrong for the same reasons the Outkick story is wrong. But unlike the Outkick headline, this one doesn’t reveal why this Shelby Houlihan character was previously shelved. Neither does the first paragraph, although the subhead does, meekly. And in the third paragraph, the author reveals why he was ignorant about Houlihan’s half last July: His research about Houlihan’s recent whereabouts evidently extended no further than asking the organizers of this beer mile if she’s raced in the past couple of years.

This is how the story treats Houlihan’s suspension: “Houlihan says that the positive was a result of a tainted pork burrito from a food truck. She appealed the ruling—and lost—and still maintains her innocence.” Nothing about the fact that keen observers and anyone from outside the U.S. thinks this is nonsense and can demonstrate why.

Also, I recently mentioned contacting Jennifer Adler, the Runner’s World editor whose pro-nasal-breathing article now stands in place of the one I wrote almost three years panning the practice. I haven’t heard back from her and don’t expect to. She can afford to be a lowbrow operator because of the impossibly low ethical bar everyone in the industry has set. Adler sucks, Runner’s World “Runner-in-Chief” Jeff Dengate sucks, and my sincere hope for all of them is that they and the rest of the gelatinous know-nothings involved in this craven episode wind up experiencing grave, even shattering life consequences as a result of things they actually didn’t do after no one listens to their bawdy bleats and protests.

1. Come to think of it, this is a bad analogy, as Crouser is the man who should ultimately be recruited to launch criminals like Peter Hotez in the manner of a track-and-field “hammer” (i.e., by their ankles) through six-story windows from a horizontal distance of one hundred and twenty meters while all of America moans in ecstatic unison at the long-overdue—-and arguably too humane—punishment of society’s most ambitious sociopaths. Credit to South Park for its piercing vision of proper justice.