The Washington Post giving Shelby Houlihan's dirty anus an inelegant but thorough tongue-job is not surprising
Whether this grisly production was ordered by Phil Knight himself or Nike more generally is the only mystery
The Washington Post is a major media outlet that serves two news-alternative functions: defending the unethical conduct of large corporations (most conspicuously the pharmaceutical industry) and serving as a propaganda distributorship for the White House and the U.S. intelligence community, the two largest sources of systematic and continual disinformation Americans have ever faced.
On Friday, on the eve of the nine-day 2023 World Athletics Championships, the WaPo published a story intended to perpetuate the idea that American middle-distance superstar Shelby Houlihan, who was suspended for four years in January 2021, didn’t intentionally use performance-enhancing drugs and is thus a heart-rending, if slattern-faced, victim of a corrupt system.
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Any remotely reasonable and objective follower of track and field understands that this is flat-out bullshit, and would only read this WaPo story to be entertained by a guaranteed string of lies. A formal treatment of these lies, if such a treatment is to be effective, requires preliminaries about the media that have nothing specifically to do with track and field.
Readers of this blog who follow running but are not prolific consumers of the material presented c. 2023 as news may have been confused by the WaPo article—not its content, but its stance. Why, you might be wondering, would a major news outlet publish something so many people can immediately identify as an open-faced farce?
Such a conflict results from accepting that people like Houlihan—and entities like the massive company that was paying her to run as fast as humanly possible, Nike—can be unpretentiously bent and broken while at the same time failing to understand the reality supplied in this post’s opening paragraph: that today’s mainstream media outlets are not merely biased or slipshod or chronically understaffed—they are instead active collaborators in promoting the laughable excuses for serious oopsies that massive corporations invariably concoct in the service of protecting their reputations.
Phil Knight may not have Bill Gates-caliber money—yet—but $54 billion still leaves slush-fund cash available for manipulating any troublesome narratives in the general direction of benevolence and even purchasing the services of dim but enthusiastic pundits such as Chris Chavez of Citius Mag. It also leaves some dough on hand for perhaps setting up an exploratory committee aimed at ensuring that the bench-monkeys in the doping-control labs used by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) all develop myopia whenever they examine the biological samples of certain American athletes.
Understanding and accepting this is crucial, not for comprehending that track and field is a drug-soaked as any other sport but for avoiding becoming a brainwashing victim when it comes to issues that actually matter, such as elections, wars, homelessness, and tragicomically demented presidents. Yet millions of ostensibly educated Americans who consider themselves logical, rational thinkers are unwilling or unable to see the mainstream media for what it has become. It takes little imagination to perceive that “reporters” for outlets like the WaPo and The New York Times are actually stenographers for companies like Nike and—when it comes to foreign policy, January 6, the financial system, and censorship, and lots else—outfits that protect democracy such as the Central Intelligence Agency.
Reminders of the mainstream media’s true function is always best served with examples of older stories from the same sources.
In 2000, the WaPo admitted that not only was doping in track and field a serious problem, but was a serious problem among American athletes in particular—so much so that then-USA Track and Field CEO Craig Masback called for outsourcing the entire process of testing, catching, and penalizing American athletes to WADA.
In the two over two decades since, and especially in recent years, the WaPo has been consistently eager to use doping as a cudgel to portray track and other athletes from one country as unusually crooked. Any guesses as to the identity of this country?
In October 2020, a little over two months before Houlihan would excrete piss soon discovered to contain metabolites of the anabolic steroid nandrolone (which I now cannot help but read as “Houlihandrolone”), the WaPo published a story on Nike and the company’s purported transformation into an ethical business entity. It noted that several major figures had recently departed, among them Masback (who had moved from USATF into a high-level marketing post at Nike) and perennial ass-beating candidate John Capriotti. (The author of the piece, Rick Maese, describes Capriotti as “aggressive and colorful” right before mentioning that he actually threatened to murder someone. By all accounts, Capriotti is lucky no one even more colorful than himself ever decided to shatter his flapping mandible into a hundred pieces with a fist or a crowbar.)
The story suggests that the November 2019 suspension of Nike Oregon Project (NOP) coach Alberto Salazar, and the departure of CEO Mark Parker shortly thereafter, in effect heralded a new, dirtbag-free era. Maese even went so far as to lay out the names of some of the more ribald scandal-makers Nike was eager to leave in the dustbin of its gleefully sociopathic history:
Nike’s roster of athletes has included some of sports’ most recognizable names: Jordan, LeBron, Tiger, Kobe. It’s also a who’s who of busted dopers and cheats: Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Lance Armstrong, Justin Gatlin.
Maese essentially signaled with this piece that the WaPo would continue to flatter this supposedly more genteel and kindly version of Nike as long as Nike remained true to its tentatively glorified new image, primarily by treating women athletes better. Or at least forcefully promised to address these banal shortcomings whenever another “Oopsie!” made fresh headlines.
Now comes this amazingly lie-driven story about Houlihan, which does not merely “cast doubt” on the validity of Houlihan’s suspension but portrays it as a vicious and untenable tort. The WaPo reporter credited is Adam Kilgore, who also authored a story about the flaws in drug-testing immediately after Houlihan’s problems with drug-testers became public knowledge. But the essay might as well have been thrown together in a Slack chat involving Nike public-relations figures, slimeball lawyers, and Knight himself.
The orchestrators of Kilgore’s piece expended over 4,000 words on propping up the illusion that Houlihan was wronged. That’s around twelve pages in a standard paperback novel (and using standard Kindle settings). As a result, I am not going to fricassee the entire pile of stinking rot or even quote much of its fetid content. Anyone who reads it might be edified by cross-referencing its claims with some of the posts I’ve written about the Houlihan suspension and its treatment by the media and running-associated pundits, including:
My initial reaction in June 2021 to the running media’s collective pretense that Houlihan was innocent;
A follow-up a week and a half later demonstrating that the level of denial had deepened;
A look at a hilarious attempt to exonerate Houlihan by on-the-ground burrito-evaluators in July 2021;
A September 2021 glance at some of the most blinkered Nike-fellators ever to breach the Internet (e.g., Peter Bromka and Erin Strout, ) getting in on the FREE SHELBY! game;
A September 2021 mocking of the pro-Houlihan bullshit excreted by eminently mockworthy professional dissembler and flagrant public retard Malcolm Gladwell;
Noting the almost obligatory appearance of a GoFundMe campaign for poor, mistreated Houlihan in December 2021;
An explanation in April 2022 of how obvious it was to any appropriately skeptical and dispassionate observer that Houlihan was on drugs—not just one but many—well before she was caught (oh hi, Centro!);
A review two days later of Ross Tucker’s analysis of the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s findings on the Houlihan matter, which the running media (other than Letsrun, obviously) and squawkboxes with slopcasting platforms and Patreon subscribers predictably ignored;
A bashing of Alison Wade, a misogynist posing unsuccessfully as a running fan behind a newsletter called Fast Women, for highlighting Houlihan’s excellent July 2022 time trial in exile;
More bashing of Wade later that summer for her further glorification of Houlihan and for trying to punish someone for the crime of noticing that Houlihan was suspended from the sport and running road races anyway;
A complaint that Runner’s World—a raft of cowards and corporate knob-gobblers whose sufficiently ambulatory staffers should all run off the edge of the same tall parking structure together in an act of overdue penance for being exactly the losers they are—had dedicated coverage to Houlihan’s participation in a beer mile, though some observers were reporting that the event was in fact a jizz mile.
Perhaps the most obvious indicator Houlihan and her handlers were lying all along was quietly provided to Letsrun by Houlihan’s agent, Stephen Haas, in April of 2021—three months into Houlihan’s suspension, but two months before she and her team owned up to the suspension.
Haas obviously knew Houlihan had been suspended, as at this stage she was appealing her suspension without the public’s knowledge. If you are capable of convincing yourself that Houlihan was innocent, and that Haas was attributing her absence from racing to an injury while planning to later explain that this was in fact a lie ultimately meant to conceal Houlihan’s innocence, well, it’s folks like you who keep psychics and astrologers from starving. But there are plenty of wealthy psychics and astrologers.
There is really no need to look any deeper than this for signs Houlihan was doping—although those who do, if they have their eyes open and brains set to “MOSTLY ON,” will learn in almost-as-forceful ways that Houlihan is simply one more liar who is upset she was singled out for cheating in a sport in which everyone at her level is also cheating. That’s why she’s pissed, and she’s not faking it; her assertions of innocence arise not from having been unfairly wronged, but from so many others who should be quite fairly wronged just as Shelbo was are still active, getting paid, beating drug-tests, and setting national records. At no point has she done anything uniquely off-limits, at least nothing we* know about.
This motivation-under-the-motivation also applies to Nike’s defenses—both legal and informal—of Houlihan. Knight et al. don’t especially care about one swooshed-up athlete being suspended for doping or anything else as long as the athlete can be credibly portrayed as a rogue actor . The problem here is that Houlihan was not just a Nike athlete but the female face of the very club created in the wake of the Nike Oregon Project’s dismantling and packaged to project the entertaining falsehood that the Bowerman Track Club (BTC) and its coach, Jerry Schumacher, were ethical light-years ahead of the NOP and Salazar. Schumacher is as much a tool and a grifter as Salazar was and so is current BTC coach Shalane Flanagan. They’re all liars.
And as much as it comes with the territory, you hate to see the same tale play out over and over: An American runner on the national radar since age 15 is good enough to sign a pro contract at 22, he or she lands with Nike, and her or she almost immediately starts submitting unlikely performances, although this factor most glaring in the case of Mo Farah, who arrived at Salazar’s training doorstep in his latter twenties and is probably the dirtiest never-suspended distance runner of all time, including Vladimir Putin.
What is mostly going on here, I’m afraid, is not running fans being broadly deluded about Houlihan’s guilt. While this may be common enough, most of the experiences observers know full well she’s dirty and are too gutless to say so publicly, in most cases because their income, online renown, or both comes entirely from covering running. Kara Goucher, who wrote a book about how dope-sick the sport is and how Nike is a special breed of awful in every way, refused on a podcast she is formally associated with to say that she believed Houlihan intentionally used drugs. Is Goucher a moron or a coward? Well, she admitted in the course of the same hedge that the second label fit.
Running has become loaded with “fans” who don’t care if their favorite athletes break the rules as long as they break records or otherwise make a strong impact and provide substrate for clicks for the “fans” with slopcasts and newsletters. Most of the people who still watch pro track meets on television who are strongly opposed to doping are getting close to Knight’s age. This wouldn’t be so irritating if it weren’t for the rest of life being an effort to dodge an avalanche of lies about covid, Ukraine, the disposable Biden family, “gender-affirming” surgeries, illegal immigration, the economy, crime, and the blowjob-performing advice being freely handed out to public-school kindergarteners.
I’m betting Wade and the rest of the pro-doping U.S.-based harridans will link to the WaPo story with no comment, or by saying they found it “interesting.” All of them are anti-integrity twits who want nothing more than for Houlihan to return to the sport and win an Olympic medal, thereby “proving the old doubters wrong.” They want an excuse to cheer for someone they’ve actually spoken to or given money to or even met, regardless of how defamatory this is to running itself.
Why would pundits like Wade and Strout care if their heroes are cheating? They’re liars, cheaters, and cowards themselves. They not only approve of disrupting women’s races with the presence of “trans women” (i.e., men), but actively agitate for this outcome and lament the creation of rules that limit or discourage the farce. This is not debatable. It overstrains credulity to believe that these same women could possibly be concerned about women’s races being disrupted by dopers; after all, in theory, men and steroids are both banned substances in women’s athletics.
But at least the harridans can blame low self-esteem and intragender competition for their positions. The male pundits who have treated Houlihan’s defense as legitimate are just plain afraid to say what they believe. They’re here to make money from writing and creating podcasts, not get at the truth of anything, at least when the truth is inconvenient.
I’ve always known that professional running is powered by banned drugs and cheating and always will be, because all sports are and always will be. But it nevertheless for many years provided a partial refuge from politics and government mayhem. That’s gone now, too. I’m not very far into my unofficial refusal to pay close attention to the professional side of the sport, but that decision is already enjoying a modicum of reinforcement thanks to this latest pro-Houlihan nonsense.
Paul Greene—Houlihan’s lawyer in 2021 and another attorney with not a mouth in the lower portion of his face but a gaping human anus that exudes am acrid greenish-brown cloud of sulfuric lies whenever its syphilis-ravaged lips unpucker and part wide—had this to say for the story credited to Adam Kilgore:
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” said Houlihan’s lawyer, Paul Greene, who specializes in sports doping cases. “And I think Shelby’s case is the most unjust one that I have seen or been part of.”
Translation: "I've been getting rich lying about cheaters for two decades, and the Shelby Houlihan case has been the most lucrative source of lying I've ever enjoyed. Or at least right up there."
This paid liar—and yes, even crooks (and sometimes especially crooks) need lawyers too, but a paid liar is still all Greene is—has a son on the University of Colorado track team who specializes in the 800 meters. (This is less interesting than the son of the drummer for Van Halen running for C.U. a decade or so ago.) While it’s not always far to assume that the children of ethical black holes always turn out to be scumbags as well, this has historically proven a disconcertingly high-percentage breeding-and-rearing shot.
But apart from that, remember when legendary C.U. track and field coach Mark Wetmore couldn’t remember in 2019 whether the creepy-looking bastard who later became Salazar’s pet thyroxine dealer, endocrinologist Jeffrey Brown, had been involved with Adam and Kara Goucher when those two were Buffs?
One somewhat confusing aspect in light of recent Goucher statements is the involvement of disgraced (but very active) endocrinologist Jeffrey Brown (that’s the Brown named in the above lawsuit) in Mark Wetmore’s University of Colorado program when Kara and Adam Goucher were members of the team. In fact, the Gouchers are who connected Brown to Salazar in the first place.
Nah, I don’t either. No one does, because you just get used to the ubiquity of corner-cutting and the phenomenal efforts to hide the chicanery.
I admit I’m almost proud of Nike for so successfully fooling so many of the sport’s supposed fans without seeming to try especially hard to do it, the velocity of its payouts in the service of its image notwithstanding. I know most running fans under 40 are inherently daft, but this still takes some real work.