Shelby Houlihan's shitty excuses are bathing her defenders in the spreading stink

"I believe Shelby! She...wait, she said what? OK, I believe that instead!"

Shelby Houlihan has spent the first sixteen or so months of her 48-month suspension from athletics concocting and desperately trying to prop up a tainted-food story as a means of preserving her image, if not her sporting eligibility. Despite all of her material claims having been soundly refuted, she has maintained for nearly a year now that her “unjust” ban is the result of not mere sloppiness but malevolence on the part of doping authorities; more recently, as we* shall explore, Houlihan has added “Maybe it was vitamins” and “Maybe someone close to me sabotaged me” to the list of possible reasons she was “wrongly” sidelined, perhaps forgetting in her haste to expand this list that blaming a supplement or a teammate pretty much takes “WADA is aligned against me, and CAS sucks dicks” off the table. (None of these “quotes” are “exact quotes,” by the way.)

Thanks to the aggressive dishonesty of the U.S. media, the thermonuclear floor-humping hypocrisy of multiple major American running figures, and the innate confusion of the average news and event consumer c. 2022, Houlihan’s objectively hopeless, fact-starved muckraking has led a nontrivial fraction of the running population to either believe Houlihan’s claims or publicly pretend to believe them, the latter stance being both more popular and a more morally chaotic. This is perhaps why she (or at least her words) evinced such confidence in offering some of the most cringe-inducing interview replies I have ever read in this May 21 conversation with Sarah Lorge Butler, whose role at Runner’s World Online is keeping the entire publication worthwhile by herself despite no visible means of editorial or cultural support.

As a result of Houlihan having firmly committed to “I’m innocent, I’m no more than a good hard-working girl, I just can’t prove it,” at the time she belatedly disclosed her suspension in June of last year, Houlihan entered 2022 with only a few conceivable PR strategies at her disposal. Whatever she said or did, it was certain to make her look even more like a victim to those in the thrall of her lies and even more like a clown to those with functioning bullshit detector-conscience ensembles.

In the eyes of the latter, Houlihan choosing recently to do a podcast with a teenage hyperfan surely makes that short “How can Shelbo fuck herself in the face even harder?” list. I didn’t listen to the podcast and only know about it thanks to the May 30 edition of Alison Wade’s Fast Women newsletter. The emphasis is mine in the quoted section below.

Shelby Houlihan did a Q&A with Runner’s World’s Sarah Lorge Butler and went on the Running Effect podcast last week. The podcast was widely criticized because the host was unabashedly pro-Houlihan and refused to allow comments on social media that didn’t support her. But keep in mind that the host is a junior in high school. I don’t plan on following Houlihan’s every move while her ban is ongoing, but because this was her first time speaking freely at length since she was banned, some details that I thought were interesting include…

“Give a shitty podcaster a break, she’s only a kid” directed at unnamed critics says nothing about the Houlihan ban itself, and is typical of the misdirection Wade employs whenever she knows she has to at least briefly mention a development in the running world (notice where in the newsletter she places this item) but is aghast at the notion of offering an opinion of her own with any teeth to her thousands of subscribers. (This hesitation has never been an issue when the possibility of getting some allegedly unruly male booted from the sport has arisen.) And “Not to follow Houlihan's every move” doesn’t really work for Wade given that she has been perhaps Houlihan's single most eager high-profile de facto publicist since the disclosure of Houlihan's ban. Such as:

Also, the idea that Houlihan hasn’t spoken at length is right up there with the idea that she is tattoo-averse. According to the Internet I use, Shelbo hasn’t shut the fuck up at all for very long since coming clean about her dirty urine. Wade’s claim dismisses Letsrun stories from April 13 and May 18 (the latter coming three days before the RW interview), this Instagram post with over 5,300 likes (also from May 18) and a wealth of other blather Houlihan has emitted since admitting to her suspension (which she only did five months after it went into effect).

Has Wade forgotten about her own annoyance over Houlihan appearing on Fox News to defend herself last June? Does she recall that Houlihan started a GoFundMe to crowdsource her legal fees?

What Wade means here is "This is the first stuff someone has said to someone whose work I'm willing to link to," or something close to that sentiment. You'd have to have been in a coma for the past year to think Houlihan has been reclusive in absentia. 

As for the interview content, it’s what you’d expect from someone who has been reduced to a series of manipulative public gambits, assuming she hasn’t always been this way. No matter what she says, she won’t admit that at least one banned substance was in her system by design. And she’s probably becoming increasingly frustrated by knowing that dozens of other doped-up distance runners will be free to compete for World Championship medals this summer in Eugene, including a number she’s spent time with. That could be Houlihan’s next thing: Unable to restore her own career, she might opt for the Floyd Landis route and pay her legal bills with an advance for a book that spills the truth not just about herself but about other big names, or at least represents a watered-down, cleaned-up confessional a la Suzy Hamilton and her account of her post-running-career sex work in Las Vegas.

As one reader of the RW interview remarked, “My guess is that she read the Letsrun analysis with Ross Tucker and went back to the banned supplements argument, even though her supplements were tested and came back negative.” This makes sense—Houlihan has no choice at this stage but to plant as many sources of potential doubt in people’s minds as she can. She’s obviously planning to race again when her ban is lifted in January 2025, by which time the Bowerman Track Club will probably not exist, at least not in its current form.

If I pull one or two Houlihan quotes from the interview for purposes of shredding them, I will have no logical basis for not continuing until I have parsed every one of her statements. It’s just a sad and shitty mess of whining, blaming, defiance, and thinly masked sadness. It doesn’t make internal sense, let alone comport with various known facts of her case. Maybe she’s become so used to filtering out adverse commentary on her social accounts that she was unprepared for a skilled questioner like Lorge Butler, who didn’t just arrive to the convo with a list of questions, but chased Houlihan down some rhetorical corridors that opened during the interview.

The potential for an enormous level of schadenfreude exists in Houlihan’s increasingly unstable orbit now that she is amending her story and her relationships with her (past) coaches and teammates have evidently cooled. This is because every "I believe Shelby" voice from 2021 now must decide which of the conflicting versions of this "credible" and "not that stupid!" athlete's accounts to accept. 

Is it the one where a burrito that tasted funny must have been the culprit? Or does Team Shelbo now have to determine which Bowerman Track Club athlete, coach or pill-runner most closely resembles a saboteur? Are there any authentic Mexican supplement carts operating in Portland?

This applies tenfold to the teammates and coaches of Houlihan who have offered her succor in exile. The BTC is afflicted with the same obligatory ethical leprosy-lesions as any similarly successful club of its type and any that might be cobbled together after its dissolution—it’s only a matter of the specifics and what those involved manage to mostly contain. For this and other reasons, it was gratifying to watch 2021 two-event Olympian Woody Kincaid forced to the sidelines and a cheerleading role during the 10,000m at the Prefontaine Classic on Friday night, the victim of what looked like a side stitch. That race was the qualifier for the 2022 World Championships, which, sadly, will be held at the same venue the Pre Classic was—Hayward Field.

My next post will bemoan the sanitized, even sterilized (but not neutered) coverage of that two-day meet, unless I decide to write about the past weekend’s three New Hampshire State Championship meets first. I may also begin dabbling in expert advice: About how active bulimics can keep costs down during times of high inflation, on to tell which fun-run regulars are likely to give you an STD, and the best after-dark tactics for discouraging migrating Californians from purchasing a home in your immediate neighborhood. Also in the site’s future is a column on why living on organic food is a poorer financial and health investment than spending $100 a week on scratch tickets.