Josh Levin: As soon as I heard about the story, I started bothering David about it because it seems so ridiculous. Shelby Houlihan claims she ordered a carne asada burrito, which is a beef burrito, but that she ingested the nandrolone because she’d eaten pig offal. So she was alleging burrito cross-contamination. But David, you told me that you don’t think her story is so ridiculous, or actually if it is ridiculous, you don’t think it has much bearing on whether she’s innocent or guilty.
David Epstein: There are a lot of issues here. She had to try to establish the source of the nandrolone for her appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. They were appealing on a technical matter that hasn’t really been in the news, which is that if it is meat contamination, as opposed to injected nandrolone, the testing procedure is different.
So with a female athlete, first they check, are they pregnant? Because there’s some natural nandrolone if they’re pregnant. When they say they’re not, it goes to this other testing area, and then there’s another split in what happens depending on if it turns out that the nandrolone was naturally produced by some other animal or it was injectable. And so to argue the case, they were forced to try to come up with some plausible story.
Houlihan gave her hair samples, she had other tests around it that were negative, so she’s probably not injecting it, or those tests would have been positive. It’s improbable that someone would be taking nandrolone orally—it doesn’t work as well orally. The burrito story is improbable. Maybe they don’t know where it came from.
What we’re left with is: Nandrolone is a common contaminant. It makes up most of the positive tests that the Athletics Integrity Unit finds. We know it gets injected into meat illegally. Versus the chance that she was for some reason taking it orally, which would be very rare, and the stupidest thing you could possibly take.
So I’m sort of stuck between these improbable stories, but my reflex these days when someone tests positive for nandrolone is to think that it may be accidental because it’s a substance that everyone knows not to take on purpose anymore.
Joel Anderson: Is your sense then that people really don’t mean to take nandrolone anymore as a performance-enhancing drug? Because I remember even going back to the ‘90s, like Linford Christie, Merlene Ottey, great Olympic sprint champions tested positive for nandrolone and were suspended. So is your sense then that it really has fallen out of favor with elite athletes because it’s so easy to detect?Last week, Shelby Houlihan, the American record holder in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters,
announced that she had tested positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone and received a four-year suspension from the sport. Houlihan says she has never doped, and her team offered an alternative explanation for the positive test: She had ingested the banned substance from a burrito she ordered from a food truck. Houlihan’s suspension knocked her out of this month’s U.S. Olympic trials and also will prevent her from competing at the 2024 Olympics in Paris if not overturned.
On this week’s episode of
Hang Up and Listen, the hosts discussed Houlihan’s case with David Epstein, the author of
The Sports Gene and
Range. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Josh Levin: As soon as I heard about the story, I started bothering David about it because it seems so ridiculous. Shelby Houlihan claims she ordered a carne asada burrito, which is a beef burrito, but that she ingested the nandrolone because she’d eaten pig offal. So she was alleging burrito cross-contamination. But David, you told me that you don’t think her story is so ridiculous, or actually if it is ridiculous, you don’t think it has much bearing on whether she’s innocent or guilty.
David Epstein: There are a lot of issues here. She had to try to establish the source of the nandrolone for her appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. They were appealing on a technical matter that hasn’t really been in the news, which is that if it is meat contamination, as opposed to injected nandrolone, the testing procedure is different.
So with a female athlete, first they check, are they pregnant? Because there’s some natural nandrolone if they’re pregnant. When they say they’re not, it goes to this other testing area, and then there’s another split in what happens depending on if it turns out that the nandrolone was naturally produced by some other animal or it was injectable. And so to argue the case, they were forced to try to come up with some plausible story.
Houlihan gave her hair samples, she had other tests around it that were negative, so she’s probably not injecting it, or those tests would have been positive. It’s improbable that someone would be taking nandrolone orally—it doesn’t work as well orally. The burrito story is improbable. Maybe they don’t know where it came from.
What we’re left with is: Nandrolone is a common contaminant. It makes up most of the positive tests that the Athletics Integrity Unit finds. We know it gets injected into meat illegally. Versus the chance that she was for some reason taking it orally, which would be very rare, and the stupidest thing you could possibly take.
So I’m sort of stuck between these improbable stories, but my reflex these days when someone tests positive for nandrolone is to think that it may be accidental because it’s a substance that everyone knows not to take on purpose anymore.
Joel Anderson: Is your sense then that people really don’t mean to take nandrolone anymore as a performance-enhancing drug? Because I remember even going back to the ‘90s, like Linford Christie, Merlene Ottey, great Olympic sprint champions tested positive for nandrolone and were suspended. So is your sense then that it really has fallen out of favor with elite athletes because it’s so easy to detect?
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Epstein: When I reported on baseball, when someone would say they had a false positive test, I always said, “BS,” except I came around on nandrolone specifically because it’s a common contaminant and it’s the single easiest thing to test for. Even baseball’s sorry-ass testing basically kicked nandrolone out of use, because if you inject it, which is how people typically use it, it is detectable for months.
As testing has gotten somewhat better and more truly random, it quickly fell out of favor, because if you’re injecting it, which again, is the way that people take it, it gets stored in your fat deposits and the metabolites are detectable for a long time. Otherwise, you could take it orally. I haven’t really heard of people doing that before. And it also wouldn’t be as effective. But I do think it’s a drug that for professional athlete use, it kind of went bye-bye when testing became legitimately random and independent.
Stefan Fatsis: So it’s not that the burrito story is improbable. It’s that it’s irrelevant. Like you said, she had to make up something because to take your case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, you need some defense. When the real defense here is that these tests are probably too sensitive now, they’re too good, they can detect too small traces of banned substances, and they sort of defy logic because the logic of using nandrolone just doesn’t exist anymore.