Okay so the more I look into this, the more I'm starting to believe Shelby Houlihan, current record holder of both the 1,500 and 5,000-meter races in America.
So that's funny, right?
She blamed a street burrito—probably a darn good street burrito…
For a failed steroid test!
And sure, she tested positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone. That's a fact. And she's not disputing that. And nandrolone is definitely a popular performance-enhancing drug. She's not disputing that either.
But she is saying, well, that the blame lies with a street burrito she consumed 10 hours before taking the test.
And this is actually quite important because she's been banned for FOUR YEARS of competition. And that's a considerably long period of time, especially given the fact that it now covers both the "2020" Tokyo games and the 2024 games in Paris.
That's a lot to miss.
And I don't mean to talk about a woman's age, but this chick's 28, so four years is a very long time at this point. This is basically the prime age for female Olympic runners.
So let's look at a study by the National Library of Medicine concerning pork consumption and nandrolone levels in the body, shall we?
So for this study three male volunteers were asked to eat about two-thirds of a pound of pork. They produced urine tests both before and after eating the pork (no word on whether it was a pork burrito). And what did these scientists find?
19-NA [this is nandrolone] and 19-NE concentrations in urine reached 3.1 to 7.5 microg/L nearby 10 hours after boar tissue consumption…
We have thus proved that eating tissues of non-castrated male pork (in which 17beta-nandrolone is present) might induce some false accusations of the abuse of nandrolone in antidoping.
Shelby Houlihan claims she had to Google all of this "nandrolone stuff once her test came back positive, and she probably had some of the same thoughts I'm having now. So she tried to fight the suspension.
"I did everything I could to prove my innocence," she wrote. "I passed a polygraph test. I had my hair sampled by one of the world's foremost toxicologists. WADA agreed that test proved that there was no buildup of this substance in my body, which there would have been if I were taking it regularly. Nothing moved the lab from their initial snap decision. Instead, they simply concluded that I was a cheater and that a steroid was ingested orally, but not regularly. I believe my explanation fits the facts much better—because it's true. I also believe it was dismissed without proper due process."
So blaming a failed steroid test on a street burrito doesn't seem so silly after all, does it?
I sure hope she at least gets to fight this, but we shall see.
