토토사이트 검증

Shelby Houlihan Still Says She Didn’t Cheat 토토사이트 검증

The 2021 season had just begun and professional runner Shelby Houlihan had big plans. As the reigning American record holder in the 1500- and 5000-meter track events, she was looking forward to the upcoming Olympic Track & Field Trials and the fruition of a lifelong dream: a medal at the Summer Games.

On January 14, 2021, while out for brunch in Flagstaff, Arizona, Houlihan received an email from the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), an independent anti-doping agency based in Monaco that had given her an out-of-competition urine test in December. The language in the message was hard for her to decipher on her phone, but what was clear was the fact that she had failed the drug test and was being provisionally suspended from her sport.

Houlihan had tested positive for a metabolite of the hormone nandrolone, a banned muscle-strengthening steroid frequently found by doping authorities, but a substance Houlihan says she had never heard of. Metabolites are made or used when the body breaks down food, drugs, and other chemicals. Anti-doping drug tests scan for the known metabolites of certain illegal substances such as nandrolone, a hormone similar in chemical structure and performance-enhancing benefits to testosterone. (The metabolite in Houlihan’s sample was 19-norandrosterone, or 19-NA.) The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA—which maintains what it calls its Prohibited List and passes down the procedural rules of testing—has banned nandrolone as an anabolic androgenic steroid for more than 40 years. (Of the 278,047 samples collected in 2019—the most recent data available not affected by the pandemic—2,701 samples, or 2 percent, were reported as Adverse Analytical Findings with 10 positive findings of nandrolone.)

Shelby Houlihan Speaks Out About Her Drug Ban

Does Doping Make It Impossible to Be a Fan?

Houlihan told me she’s always been a staunch anti-doping advocate who sees her sport as a way to challenge herself—not an exercise in cutting corners in an effort to win at all costs. “I have no interest in taking shortcuts. I don’t know how people cheat and feel like they deserve the things that they accomplish,” she recently said in a podcast interview. “I will never understand that. That’s not who I am.”

Regardless, she now finds herself at the center of an ongoing debate at the highest level of international sport about whether anti-doping agencies have run afoul of the athletes they are tasked with protecting. After decades of ever more sophisticated cheaters beating the tests, world anti-doping authorities now find themselves with the ability to inspect samples down to one-trillionth of a fine grain of sand. But are they too far out in front of the science when it comes to understanding what, exactly, they are finding?