Shelby Houlihan's GoFundMe campaign highlights elite running's next logical step: Just eliminate shoe contracts
Fans of this ridiculous sport may be hapless dupes, but they're obviously willing to open their wallets to the right people. Why not crowd-source the whole circus?
Unwavering fans of Shelby Houlihan, levied a four-year suspension from track and field on January 14 for a doping violation, have offered assorted reasons for continuing to accept Houlihan’s claims of innocence. She couldn’t have been that dumb. Mistakes happen. Lab officials are biased. Proper procedures were not followed. People test positive from food all the time. And my favorite, Shelby shows real emotion, real pain (apparently, guilty people never become visibly upset after losing almost everything they value). But whether they know it or not, Team Shelbo reserves its greatest collective zeal for Houlihan’s increasingly unsophisticated attempts to deceive them, the media, and the at-large public about her suspension.
Team Shelbo is a frenetic collection of pro-doping, anti-research masochists who are ignorant of, or dismiss, all pertinent history. And like everyone else using buttons on social media primarily as tools to lessen the sting of their own sublimated shortcomings, they positively adore Houlihan’s efforts to elude as many of the material consequences of her own ban as she can, and are eager to tangibly help in this regard.
Now, they have that option. On Thanksgiving Eve, commemorating the onset of the season for giving gifts to a great many undeserving people, Houlihan launched a GoFundMe campaign aimed at two distinct groups of track followers: Casual observers daft enough to believe her denials of guilt, and serious fans who agree or suspect that she’s a cheater, but don’t think she should be singled out as such in a global athletics landscape riddled with performance-enhancing drug (PED) beneficiaries so shameless that they are practically luminescent.
Does Houlihan have a history of offering trustworthy testimony about herself? If you believe she does, you should schedule a session with a neurologist.
Back on May 17, a Letsrun article—and let’s be real, while I don’t agree with half what those guys have said about this situation, they don’t miss much, and they ask real questions—speculated about Houlihan’s six-plus-month absence from racing. Bear in mind when looking at the statements below from her agent, Stephen Haas, that Houlihan was then already over four months into serving a doping suspension, with no realistic hope that anything would change in her favor.
So, per the Reverend Haas, Houlihan was battling injury and training well at the same time, within about a month of the Olympic Trials. And “Haas said he wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t race at least one of the Portland meets” is lawyerly bullshit-comedy gold. But mainly in retrospect, like most funny lawyerly bullshit.
If you’re in the camp refusing to accept either that Houlihan doped or that she should be punished for doping, it’s not a big leap from there to asserting that Houlihan had valid reasons at the time for lying about her competitive absence, as it was part of bracing the world for news of a worse “lie” by bad actors. Or you can quit camping with the paint-huffing irrationals altogether, and come join the surly bastards up the abandoned tracks who are warming our hands and asses over a stinking but non-toxic reality trash fire.
If a review of that Letsrun story is not enough to shift your view of Houlihan’s overall credibility, fast forward to her Instagram post on Wednesday announcing the launch of her GoFundMe grifting campaign (stated goal: $300,000) and a very diseased attempt at a disinformation website, ClearShelby.com, laden with repetitive and, honestly, pathetic attempts at statistical gamesmanship and other distortions.
Houlihan starts lying in the very first sentence. Her suspension began over ten months before this post. She claims to have read the e-mail containing this information over ten times when she first received it. She is continuing to push the idea that her suspension—and troubles—only began in June, when the rest of the world learned the news of her suspension.
The most charitable interpretation of the text below is that Houlihan has convinced enough credulous and biased people to accept her fairy tales to now believe some or all of her own lies (sociopaths possess this skill in abundance).
So, Team Shelbo, please explain your specific articles of support. Your options seem limited to two basic arguments, although to avoid charges of straw-manning I’ll entertain others:
One: Sure, she’s blatantly lied about multiple things relating specifically to her doping case, but in the greater picture, she really did get screwed by a stank burrito despite the astronomical odds against that happening.
Short version, we trust her about stuff that counts.
Two: She’s no dirtier than anyone else. Sure, her progression starting at age 26 and her “No supershoes for me, that’s unfair” both scream doping, but look at the freaks she’s running against. The idea is to win, not get close enough on your own steam to smell championship medals and, from agonizingly close, see dopers almost invariably claim those medals.
Short version, we worry about stuff that counts.
I think most of her supporters fall into the second category, but it’s not like many of them will come out and say so, not with their names attached. This whole charade is nothing more than a woman who looks increasingly willing to say or do anything leveraging the unmerited yet limitless faith and devotion of a certain percentage of American competitive-cardio fans.
Concerning her legal fees, it’s interesting that Nike presumably has language in its athlete contracts stipulating that if they’re busted for PED offenses, they’re on their own. Consider how diabolical this is. While it makes sense for a brand to say, “If you don’t jump off rooftops, we don’t need to offer you a net at the bottom,” the brand still gets to benefit from all of the safe landings “jumpers” make at their own risk. And Nike is well aware of what it takes to achieve ultimate success—and always has been.
As of this writing, in the thirty or so hours of its existence, Houlihan’s GoFundMe campaign has grossed over $10,500. It’s unclear how the holiday timing of the launch has affected the trajectory of the initial donation surge, but say she gets to $50,000 within a year. That’s enough for a parsimonious elite runner to survive on without having to live in Saggy Scrotum, Alabama or skimp on necessities like Netflix subscriptions and IPA.
Considering the average track fan’s charming combination of credulity, selective ethics, and egoistic hunger to play real, visible roles in elite-level happenings, maybe it would be a good idea to dispose of the entire idea of shoe contracts for pro runners and go entirely to crowdsourcing as a means of financial support. This would allow every aspect of a runner’s athletic career—race planning, basic performance expectations, incentives, even where someone chooses to live and train—to develop naturally rather than be hard-coded as obligations.
Clearly, this would not set up a system in which rewards scale precisely with athlete output
When I scan the landscape, I can see at least a dozen American women under 40 who could easily extract $100 a year from 1,000 men, along with a total of maybe $250 a year from women, for at least five straight years. And it would matter how well they performed as long as they still looked good and were sort of elite-ish throughout. And, to a far lesser but perhaps non-negligible extent, male elites possessing unusual levels of charisma in context could also make reasonably good money.
But even accounting for the inevitable disproportionate success of those with the gifts to combine enviable looks (or similar “this is me” self-branding) with national-class times, I have to think a few currently no-name 2:30 ladies and 2:15 men could benefit from this.
Finally, this kind of scheme would allow runners to work side jobs if they wanted to, And why wouldn’t they? I’m almost surprised more elite runners don’t choose to have full-time jobs outside running these days. It’s not like this is the 1970s and remote jobs are either scarce or nonexistent. If you’re a college graduate and runner and can’t find something for 20 hours a week that’s less draining than the video games you would play during that time anyway, you’re probably too fundamentally lazy to make it as a post-collegiate runner anyway.
But the primary allure here isn’t that some people can make more than they would from a shoe contract based on talent alone. It’s not having to deal with someone else’s often-capricious demands, such as Wokeness disqualifying you next year for being too pale or straight for a company’s needs. Sure, this kind of income stream is even more uncertain than a contract is, but again, you can do other income-earning things while you maintain your RunMyAss.net profile to the liking of your supporters.
I began writing this, or at least the part about crowdfunding, as an exploratory joke. I still mean it that way, but it doesn’t seem like much more of a laff riot than the current state of the sport. I mean, here we* have a doper that is most likely going to take in more money from this dubious GoFundMe campaign than all but a handful of American distance runners training and racing without controversy ever will even in a great year. That’s pretty dumb. Some U.S. woman is going to break through to a sub-2:25:00 in 2022, and her end-of-year earnings may well still be lower than those of Shelby Houlihan.
What’s unquestionably a joke is the idea that basic reasoning power, support for Houlihan to return to the sport before her ban ends, and a desire for a drug-free sport can exist in the same mind. At this point, it’s just not possible to be someone who can think clearly, someone who truly wants a no-doping landscape, and someone who wants to see Houlihan in uniform again.
A single desperate and deluded person is one thing, and everyday incurious goobers are never going to be anything but incurious goobers who react to headlines or even tweets about headlines without reading any of the associated material or the backstory behind it. But the willingness of so many far wiser people to swallow so much obvious claptrap has confounded me. Especially after many of them jumped all over Alberto Salazar's Nike Oregon Project group.
Do people really think there is something more fundamentally righteous about Houlihan and her situation, or is this a matter of people simply playing favorites in deciding who should be punished and how severely? This doesn’t seem a hard question to address or answer.
For reasons that shouldn’t need explaining, Houlihan, her BTC cheerleading squad and associated hacks notwithstanding, is quietly becoming a reviled figure in the running world in circles that matter. As a natural cynic who feels that optimism is an eminently reasonable position to strive for, I’m continually telling myself that the cries of the loudest Twitter assholerati virtually never reflect majority public sentiment. This disconnect is probably even greater in running than in other cultural niches, Twitter being Wokester central and running being among the most popular real or feigned hobbies of the Wokish, an in-gazing and neurotic bunch.
Either way, if a version of sport that welcomes back Houlihan is one enough people want, good for them. Let them have it, and let them savor the bitter flavor of tainted vicarious victories. It’s no skin off my scrote if, by 2030, half of the elite women in the U.S. either have penises or steroid-bloated clitori indistinguishable from same. All I do anymore is watch races, write about the sport and its people, hang around runners, and run every day, because I’m different from you nutzoids and require a degree of mental separation from all the disturbing nonsense you create.
Anyway, ‘tis the season for giving. Govern yourselves accordingly.