The Washington Post isn't the only outlet STILL pushing the idea OBVIOUS doper Shelby Houlihan was SHAFTED
Media whoredom is a perfectly legal grift, but at one point do these sluts tire of choking on dicks just to serve corporate corruption and disinformation projects?
Last week, I reviewed a Washington Post story aimed at convincing the world that Shelby Houlihan, as obvious a drug-cheat as there ever was even before she was caught, never cheated and was instead victimized by malign or incompetent forces. No one who follows track and has a modest amount of brainpower believes this nonsense, which started as soon as Houlihan’s four-year suspension—which she and her team concealed from the public for five months while lying all the while about her absence from racing—became news in June 2021, shortly before Houlihan would have competed at the U.S.A. Outdoor Championships for a berth in that summer’s belatedly staged Tokyo Summer Olympics.
On July 27, Outside Online published a column by Martin Fritz Huber titled “Shelby Houlihan Is Ruffling Feathers During Her Doping Ban.” The catalyst for the piece was Houlihan taking part in a beer mile in late June and setting a world record, which Runner’s Worldduly covered in a manner that portrayed Houlihan’s suspension as genuinely controversial.
Houlihan’s suspension is only controversial in the sense that most American distance-running pundits with any sort of platform are beset by a combination of ignorance and gutlessness. No one with a high follower number or ambitions of achieving same has been remotely honest throughout the Houlihan saga, which is among the reasons I prefer to confront pro running as the Wokeblown reality show it deserves to be regarded as, and point and laugh at the both the saps who think Houlihan is clean and the countless conformists too cowardly to admit that they believe she’s dirty. This is easier than trying to prop up the illusion that anyone should watch it as sport anymore,
These pundits constitute a wall of yammering white flak. And most readers already know that Outside Online publishes nothing but dreck and that Huber is among its most valued contributors to its online slagheap. But those who don’t can figure this out from this column’s subhead alone: “Houlihan has been throwing down impressive times this summer, despite being suspended from her sport.” This is like observing that someone who was arrested two years ago for DUI is still both drinking and driving an automobile, though not necessarily in combination. What’s the startling aspect of any of this?
When major mainstream outlets like the WaPo push a story aimed at chiseling well-earned layers of caked-on mud from a dirty track athlete’s reputation, they aren’t trying to rehabilitate that athlete’s reputation; they’re seeking to clean up the image of whatever company sponsors or sponsored that athlete (usually Nike). At least some of the editors at these outlets know that their disingenuous stories will do their job of snookering the general public, because the general public is even more clueless about sports like track and field than people who follow track and field. But when pubs like Runner’s World and Outside Online do this, it’s especially obnoxious, because while the intent is the same, anyone who runs interference for dopers in outlets aimed at competitive distance runners knows a high percentage of readers will immediately dismiss the writer as a hack and the outlet as malign.
Huber to my knowledge isn’t a malign or stupid person, even if the person last known to be assigning and editing his stories, Molly Mirhashem, is proudly and conspicuously both. But his official job title might as well be “hack.” His entire function at Outline Online is to react to existing controversies ginned up in other outlets as if he’s some unusually qualified information-arbiter and use twice as many words as he needs to tendentiously pretend to sit on the fence of the issue in question while always in the end siding, albeit sometimes tepidly, with the pro-corporate conclusion required of him.
Martin Fritz Huber threw his dunce-cap into the ring on June 15 with a story topped by a headline describing the Houlihan verdict as uncertain, helpfully dispensing of the need to scan the article below for signs of objectivity. Outside also can’t decide whether this uncertainty is “brutal” or merely “devastating.”
At one point in his unfurling of characteristic tedium, Huber observes:
“It’s difficult to watch the press conference, which was put on by the Nike-sponsored Bowerman Track Club, and not come away with a sense that Houlihan is indeed an innocent victim.”
I’ll essentially repeat what I said about [Jon] Gault’s interpretation of the presser: Only someone psycho-emotionally primed to weigh the BTC garbage-dump as a wrenching revelation of impropriety by anti-doping authorities could possibly view it as such. Moreover, if you’re weighing what you already know about the case against a bunch of “I’m innocent” crying we’ve* all seen in some form by noteworthy dopers of yore, then you get points for empathy but demerits for credulity.
Since this appears to be the last and only thing Huber wrote about Shelby Houlihan before his late-July “ruffling feathers” column, it’s fair to assume he’s still not convinced Houlihan doped. In reality, I would bet that he is, but hacks tend to keep regular freelance gigs when they filter any honesty from their assessments.
It’s likely Huber was aware of Ross Tucker’s April 2022 analysis of the report the Court of Arbitration for Sport had released the previous summer upholding Houlihan’s suspension, and he was probably aware of the report itself when it was released. But the running media, other than the outlet that commissioned Tucker’s work, ignored all of this.
My characterization of Huber in remarking on the collective non-reaction to Tucker’s strongly worded “Come on, folks”:
Martin Fritz Huber of Outside Online is a smart guy, but he writes dumb shit because his only role for that outlet is to create and amplify drama for his editorial shitlords, not offer sincere analyses, so it’s both unclear and moot what his sense of a “dirty progression” resembles. But when Houlihan came clean about being unclean last June, Huber was distraught about “the brutal uncertainty” of her ban.
Tucker’s essay should have helped dissolve any remaining uncertainty in this area for Huber and others, but if so, they’re evidently standing on the sidelines in silent awe.
Nothing about this has changed. Huber just steadily churns out thoughtless chum for just-as-steady checks. This is why it’s funny to see this from Huber in his belching about the beer-mile:
Last week, on Letsrun.com’s podcastJonathan Gault, an erstwhile advocate of Houlihan’s innocence, said that he didn’t feel comfortable with the fact that she was racing. “I guess it’s not violating the conditions of her ban, but I would say it’s violating the spirit of her ban,” Gault said.
It’s not clear what makes Huber think that Gault is a former advocate of Houlihan’s innocence. If he has in fact changed his mind, then why is this article still up?
That Jon Gault piece included these words:
We at LetsRun.com are firmly anti-doping. But just as important as busting cheats — scratch that, it’s more important — is protecting innocent athletes.
We at Beck of the Pack really enjoy most of Gault’s work and have admitted we would even pay to read it, but he completely puked all over his keyboard here. “I guess it’s not violating the conditions of her ban, but I would say it’s violating the spirit of her ban” is the most soy-diluted condemnation possible. It’s an embarrassment to this day, and my respect for Letsrun’s at one time at least semi-aggressive anti-doping stance—and its balls, which is odd since it’s an all-male operation—will never be the same.
But I get it. Anyone who doesn’t want to be barred from interviewing Nike athletes (the Letsrun team is currently in Budapest for the 2023 World Athletics Championships) has to pull punches. The solution to that chronic moral itch is simply not organizing your life around interviewing professional underfed dopers and instead writing about their antics from the outside. It’s a lot more fun and less soul-searing, especially if you’re not especially worried how a bevy of bent and craven people view you.
It’s also helpful to do some research on topics you “cover” when you go more than two years between stories about them. In his June 2021 “brutal uncertainty” piece, Huber wrote:
Although there is a record of power sport athletes like Jones, Clemens, or the boxer Tyson Fury being busted for nandrolone, the drug seems far less common among endurance athletes.
Had Huber visited this page while working on his story, he might have changed his mind. The June 10, 2021 version included 47 athlete suspensions involving nandrolone cases, 17 of which were levied against endurance athletes, including racewalkers. And Ali Saidi-Sief was even faster than Dieter Baumann was.
And had Huber wanted to check up on the status of nandrolone in distance running before his “ruffling feathers” piece, he could have unearthed “Doping in Kenya,” a February 2022 report by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
How unusual is nandrolone use? If you’re Kenyan, it appears harder to dodge the stuff than it is to just give up and start ingesting it.
Huber refers in his latest piece to a column by Alan Abrahamsonof 3 Wire Sports remarking last summer on the shame of Houlihan showing up at an half-marathon in Iowa not sanctioned by USA Track and Field, and therefore outside the reach of anti-doping authorities and legal decisions, so she could win $500.
As sports columnist Alan Abrahamson argued at the time, it wasn’t great for the image of American running, especially since we tend to be pretty smug about rampant doping abuses in other countries. We would be up in arms, Abrahamson suggested, if a suspended Russian athlete competed in a race in Russia.
…
In his column, Abrahamson refers to the fact that Houlihan was allowed to compete in the Okoboji race as an ignominious “loophole” in our national anti-doping system. I think that’s overstating it. It would be a loophole if Houlihan was able to maneuver her way into a race that she would have wanted to compete in if she weren’t suspended, as when her team cynically tried to get her into the U.S. Olympic Trials on the basis that she was still trying to appeal her ban. But the University of Okoboji 10K? (I also don’t think it’s very likely that the U.S. running community would be particularly distraught if a banned Russian runner would jog their way to victory in a Vladivostok fun run.)
I can solve this problem for Huber and anyone else confused by this, including chronic Houlihan apologist Alison Wade, the proprietor of a newsletter called Fast Women that Wade occasionally uses to argue that Club-Level Men and other penis-boasting athletes should be counted as Fast Women if they so desire.
Someone else could have won that $500. Houlihan is a large wad of manure for showing up and snagging it even if a trip through technicalities leads to “Well, there was nothing stopping her.”
Maybe a little more resistance from the media and less waffling, lying, and other spastic episodes of optional stupidity would help cool Houlihan’s lust for remaining in the spotlight in ways that are clearly annoying to more people than are willing to say so. She’s obviously planning to be back in a Nike uniform in a year and a half. The Nike Bowerman Track Club, not that anyone should pity that enterprise, has lost at least one member at Houlihan’s level thanks to BTC coach Jerry Schumacher, also a sizable and lying dungwad, being unwilling to keep Houlihan away from BTC practices and in general co-signing her laughable sob-story.
Abrahamson also wrote a solid response to the Washington Post story. This offered a funny reminder of how adamant Marion Jones was for years that she was not only clean herself, but was firmly against track and field being sullied by drugs. Someday, if Houlihan decides she doesn’t ultimately receive whatever red-carpet she thinks she deserves, I bet that Houlihan starts making noises that could get some popular runners and running-figures in a world of hilarious hurt. Then maybe some of the overdriven, under-researched piffle Huber and the goobers transmit to the public about Houlihan through their morbidly clenched and untended bungholes would be worth a sniff for once.
