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.)
When I saw that Houlihan was busted for nandrolone I remembered Dieter Baumann who claimed he'd been sabotaged. I'm not going to say whether I believe him or not but I find it a credible story and considered the possibility that Houlihan might have been sabotaged. But her story is less credible than Baumann's because he immediately talked about sabotage and for her sabotage is something like the 999th excuse.
When I saw that Houlihan was busted for nandrolone I remembered Dieter Baumann who claimed he'd been sabotaged. I'm not going to say whether I believe him or not but I find it a credible story and considered the possibility that Houlihan might have been sabotaged. But her story is less credible than Baumann's because he immediately talked about sabotage and for her sabotage is something like the 999th excuse.