Opinion: Could Shelby Houlihan’s tainted burrito claim expose loopholes in doping tests?

It’s a paradox that as the testing equipment gets more sophisticated, the certainty over who is doping and who isn’t gets blurrier.

Machines are now so sensitive they can detect the minutest amounts of a performance-enhancing drug, exposing as cheats people we were once certain were clean. But those same machines can’t necessarily determine the source of the PEDs, making some of those stories that sound too wild to be believed – like a tainted burrito, perhaps – actually true.

I don’t know if Shelby Houlihan is clean or not. I find it incredulous that anyone in track and field could be unfamiliar with nandrolone, as Houlihan and her coach Jerry Schumacher claimed. Houlihan might be too young to remember Linford Christie and Merlene Ottey’s doping scandals involving the same drug, but Schumacher is not.

But Houlihan’s attorney makes a compelling case that anti-doping officials didn’t follow their own rules, and there is plenty of evidence that eating certain kinds of meat can produce low-level amounts of anabolic steroids, nandrolone among them.

What I do know is that keeping sports clean can’t be done at the expense of athletes who are innocent. Whatever loopholes exist in the World Anti-Doping Association’s testing protocols, or in the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s procedures, they must be closed.

Now.

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