A positive test, an infamous burrito and a running career in purgatory

MILFORD, Iowa — Had her life unfolded as planned, Shelby Houlihan would have been in St. Moritz, Switzerland, with her running club earlier this month preparing for the track and field world championships, which begin Saturday in Budapest. She possibly would own an Olympic medal, and her mind would be filled with visions of a Paris 2024 podium.

Instead, Houlihan walked out of her parents' lakeside cabin here holding her favorite coffee mug — "Hairy Pawter," a cat wearing glasses — in one hand and a MacBook in the other. She settled into the red Adirondack chair next to her father, Bob, who was on the porch scribbling in his Sudoku book. Her cat, Miko, lapped his water bowl. Dense fog covered Lake Okoboji just across the street, so thick that pontoon boats and kayaks glided on the water like ghostly silhouettes.

This is what competitive purgatory looks like. Houlihan was — still is — one of the fastest middle-distance runners in the world, perhaps the fastest ever from the United States. She broke American records in two outdoor events and still owns the mark in the 1,500 meters. She also is exiled from the pursuit she built her life around since childhood and branded with the worst label an athlete can carry in a sport profoundly scarred by fraudulent performance.

In December 2020, Houlihan tested positive for an anabolic steroid. She claimed a trace amount of nandrolone had been detected in her urine because she consumed a pork burrito from a food truck the night before the test. When she lost her appeal days before the 2021 U.S. Olympic trials and the case erupted into public view, her argument prompted glib headlines but also resonated as plausible to some experts. She remains adamant she is innocent, that the global anti-doping apparatus charged with protecting clean athletes instead has ensnared one.

Houlihan, 30, views the day her ban ends — Jan. 15, 2025 — with anticipation and anxiety, eager to compete but fearful of her reception. She knows some people, including competitors, will never think of her as anything but a cheater. She is still processing how her life veered and what she has lost.

"I think about it every day," Houlihan said this month, walking along Lake Okoboji. "Maybe I shouldn't, but it's hard not to. I feel like it would be so much of an easier process to accept if I had cheated. Then it's like: 'I f---ed up. These are the consequences of my actions. I made a mistake, and I deserve everything I'm going through.' But it's been so much harder to get to that point of accepting it when I'm like, 'I don't deserve this.' It's been really tricky to navigate that. I don't have answers."

To some in the running community, Houlihan is paying a deserved penance for tarnishing a sport long degraded by drug cheats — lab results are no less telltale than the clock at the finish line. To others, including the governing body that polices anti-doping in the United States, she is enduring a penalty too harsh for a case without conclusive evidence on either side, the victim of a system designed to catch cheaters at the potential expense of an innocent. To family, friends and teammates, she is a sympathetic figure robbed of her good name and athletic prime.

"I've been doing this for 20 years," said Houlihan's lawyer, Paul Greene, who specializes in sports doping cases. "And I think Shelby's case is the most unjust one that I have seen or been part of."

Houlihan has made ends meet renting out her apartment, driving for DoorDash and cat sitting. She estimates the ban will cost her about $1.8 million in prize money, endorsement deals and sponsor bonuses. The money lost, she said, pales in comparison to the ache of never knowing what she could have accomplished between ages 28 and 32. She has seven tattoos. The one on her right arm reads, "The trouble is you think you have time."

The harshest suspensions for first-time offenders last four years, a time frame designed to excise one Olympics. A timing fluke means Houlihan will miss two: Her test occurred as the pandemic pushed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to 2021. Houlihan competed at her first and only Olympics in 2016 at 23. At the next Olympics for which she will be eligible, the 2028 Los Angeles Games, she will be 35.

Houlihan has been "a little bit of a nomad" since she moved out of Portland, Ore., this year, she said. She trains in isolation, coached remotely by her sister Shayla, a professional runner turned college coach. She is spending the summer with her parents. She enrolled this year in a course on sport and performance psychology. She wants to help athletes once she finishes her running career, a simple aim born out of complicated upheaval.

"I've always wanted to have a positive impact on the sport," Houlihan said. "I started running when I was 5. This sport means everything to me. What I've always wanted to do is leave it better than I found it. It kind of feels like it's for nothing now. In a way, I feel like I've damaged it more, even though it wasn't anything I did. I'm trying to reframe that in my mind. I don't want someone else to dictate the impact I'm going to have on the sport. I want that to be my decision."

In January 2021, Houlihan was living in Flagstaff, Ariz., for an altitude training camp with the Bowerman Track Club. The U.S. Olympic trials were six months away, and Houlihan figured to be one of the stars. She had reset the American record in the 1,500 meters to 3 minutes 54.99 seconds while finishing fourth at the 2019 world championships. She broke the American record in the 5,000 meters while running a time trial during the pandemic. She planned to qualify for the 1,500 and 10,000 meters.

"She was changing the game," Bowerman teammate Elise Cranny said. "Americans hadn't run under 14:30 [in the 5,000 meters], and she was like, 'We're going to run in the 14:20s.' She wanted to see what was happening on the global stage. She saw herself there. Even at times when she wasn't there yet, she had no doubt she was going to be."

After a morning workout, she drove with teammates Karissa Schweizer and Matthew Centrowitz to pick up brunch. As they waited for their food, Houlihan's phone buzzed with an email marked URGENT and CONFIDENTIAL. "I was like, 'What the f--- is this?' " Houlihan said. She read it again and again, barely making sense of technical phrases and words she didn't recognize. Her face turned stricken.

She handed her phone to Schweizer and asked her to read it. The Athletics Integrity Unit, the anti-doping arm of World Athletics, was informing Houlihan that nandrolone was found in the urine she submitted during a drug test Dec. 14, 2020. Nandrolone is a banned substance that builds muscle and increases strength. It is typically used by bodybuilders but is not foreign to running; in the mid-2010s, the World-Anti Doping Agency reported on how frequently it was found in Kenyan distance runners. Houlihan is insistent, in the face of skepticism and derision, she had never heard of it.

Houlihan cried all the way home. She called Bowerman's coach, Jerry Schumacher, sobbing so hard that Schumacher worried she had been hurt. It took Houlihan several minutes to sputter that she had been placed on provisional suspension.

"Okay, just slow down for a second," Schumacher recalled telling Houlihan. "It's probably a mistake. There's so many things that can easily happen. I wouldn't get freaked out."

Schumacher never doubted Houlihan's innocence. He and her teammates had lived around her for years, "spending every waking moment with someone," Cranny said. At the 2019 world championships, Schumacher implored Houlihan to wear Nikes with a carbon plate in the sole, permitted technology that had led to transformative improvement across the sport. Houlihan stuck with her 2012-model Victorys.

"I was like: 'Listen, every one of your competitors is wearing these shoes. They're not illegal,' " Schumacher said. "She goes: 'I don't need them. I want to know I did it without the shoes everyone's complaining about.' "

Schumacher connected Houlihan with Greene, who told Houlihan to reconstruct a food journal from the week before her test. She no longer had some of the original bottles of supplements she took, which she said comprised calcium, multivitamin and vitamin D gummies, plus a B complex pill. She purchased more of the ones she didn't have from the store where she bought them so they could be tested, and none were contaminated.

Houlihan's team landed on a possible culprit. She had eaten dinner with teammates the night before at a food truck near her house in Beaverton, Ore. The carne asada burrito she ordered had been so greasy she couldn't finish it and it didn't taste like steak, she and two teammates would testify. The truck also served pig offal, which some studies have shown can leave nandrolone in a person's system.

Houlihan told the AIU that the metabolite for nandrolone — NA-19 — must have ended up in her system through a pork burrito she was given by mistake. Emmanuel Strahm, a former scientist at a WADA-certified lab in Stockholm, analyzed her results and said in a briefing to the AIU that they "show all the evidence of boar meat or offal consumption the day prior to when the urine test was performed."

As Houlihan waited for a hearing, she continued training. Only a few teammates knew. As she always had when her life became tumultuous, she used running as a refuge. By late spring, she was as fit as she had ever been.

Months passed. Greene said the AIU "slow-walked," delaying a hearing as the U.S. trials approached. To expedite the process so Houlihan could run at the trials, she bypassed an AIU hearing and appealed straight to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Greene is "still haunted to this day" about the decision, wondering whether waiting for the initial trial, even if it forced Houlihan to miss the Olympics, would have helped her win the case.

On June 11, Houlihan was sitting on the ground after a workout outside Park City, Utah. Schumacher knelt, leveling his face with hers. He had learned CAS's final decision: "They banned you for four years, Shelb," he said.

She waited for Schumacher to say he was kidding, and when he did not, she broke down. For 20 minutes, Houlihan stayed on the ground, crying and muttering, "I don't know what to do."

The CAS report, which would be released months later, is 44 pages laden with dense, remarkably technical science. Ultimately, three arbitrators found Houlihan believable but unable to prove her case. CAS does not issue dissents, but based on his reading of the language in the report, Greene concluded the panel ruled 2-1.

"Although the Athlete was a credible witness and has brought compelling character witness evidence in support of her defense, she has failed to establish the source of the 19-NA detected in her urine sample to the applicable standard of proof, and did not bring forward sufficient objective evidence," the panel wrote.

An anti-doping case is unlike a criminal trial. Once the AIU charges an intentional violation, the burden falls on the athlete — Houlihan was guilty until she proved herself innocent.

Greene's argument hinged on the AIU's original classification of her test. The lab considered the result an adverse analytical finding, which meant it believed the underlying markers of her test suggested intentional doping. Greene argued the lab should have considered it an atypical finding because the low level of nandrolone in her system was consistent with consuming contaminated meat, which would have required additional scrutiny of the test and meant Houlihan would have been placed under investigation and follow-up testing rather than immediately punished.

To make its case, the AIU called Christiane Ayotte as an expert witness. Ayotte also runs the lab that handled Houlihan's test on behalf of the AIU. Essentially, she served as an expert witness to testify about her own lab's findings.

Ayotte testified that the underlying markers of Houlihan's test — the carbon isotopic signatures — were "fully consistent" with the ingestion of a nandrolone product.

Ayotte's presence irked Greene. He had represented a long jumper whose four-year ban was overturned in part because CAS ruled the AIU relied on inaccurate testimony from Ayotte. He also found flaws with Ayotte's testimony in Houlihan's case, saying she ignored studies that contradicted her testimony.

"Dr. Ayotte just went off the rails, in my opinion," Greene said. "You can say that. Look, I respect her, but I don't know what she was saying. … If you're going to sit and tell me they unquestionably proved in that hearing that Shelby doped, no way. They did not prove that. And they know they didn't prove it. All that was proved was that Shelby couldn't establish that it came from pork. Because there's no way to test meat you ate five weeks ago."

Reached by email, Ayotte declined to answer questions, writing that she had no interest in public debate. "But I will say this," she wrote. "Had there been anything in their work that showed something that I did not know, that was not considered at the hearing or that would have impacted even slightly the opinion/evidence that I gave, I would have done everything and gone to every tribune to correct the wrong."

AIU accepted that Houlihan had not injected nandrolone, based on a test of her hair and the timing of clean tests before and after her positive test. If the only explanation of guilt was ingesting nandrolone, Greene argued, the amount of nandrolone in Houlihan's system would have been useless to her athletic performance. He also noted that Houlihan could have changed her whereabouts on the day of the test, which, had she been intentionally cheating, would have afforded time for the substance to pass through her system.

World Athletics also relied on testimony from John McGlone, a Texas Tech animal and food sciences professor, who testified that the chances of a boar that could produce a positive nandrolone test ending up in the North American pork supply chain were less than 1 in 10,000.

World Athletics argued that Houlihan's explanation "presupposes a cascade of factual and scientific improbabilities, which means that its composite probability is (very) close to zero." She would have been served pork even though she ordered steak; that pork would have come from boar, which constitutes a tiny percent of pork in the United States; and that boar, to produce nandrolone in a person's system, would have been uncastrated or have had undescended testicles.

When Houlihan made a long-shot appeal to a Swiss court, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency Chief Science Officer Matthew Fedoruk submitted an affidavit backing Houlihan. Fedoruk called evidence World Athletics used to make its case "erroneous," citing a Kansas State professor who refuted parts of McGlone's testimony. Fedoruk wrote it was "highly plausible … the positive test must be considered the result of unintentional and unknowing consumption of 19-NA containing boar meat."

Houlihan's case underscored a fundamental conflict in anti-doping. Drug-testing technology has improved a thousandfold over the past two decades. A failed test could be triggered by a few picograms — parts per trillion — of a substance in urine or blood. The enhanced sensitivity has helped even the odds for anti-doping bodies against cheaters. It also increases the possibility of an athlete testing positive from an innocuous source.

In USADA's view, in cases in which trace amounts of banned substances are found, investigation beyond lab results is required to protect a potentially innocent athlete from career destruction, particularly because of how difficult — if not impossible — it can be to prove how a substance was ingested.

"We always seek justice — to do what is right given the facts — not just the blind, tone deaf execution of WADA's sometimes unfair, ivory tower demands," USADA CEO Travis Tygart said in a text message. "Unfortunately, there is frequently a real tension between the two."

"USADA's direct and repeated attempts to discredit a CAS tribunal decision is troubling coming from a national anti-doping organization — they were not involved in the case," Ayotte said.

Before the CAS hearing, Houlihan had an option available to any accused athlete: admit guilt and reduce her ban to three years.

"It was never a consideration on my end," Houlihan said. "I didn't do anything, so I'm not going to say that I did and lie."

Houlihan instantly recognized the core difference between three years and four.

"She's going to miss a second Olympics," Greene said, "because she wouldn't admit to something she didn't do."

Houlihan owned a 1971 Volkswagen bus that maxed out at 55 mph and lacked air conditioning and power steering. After the CAS decision came down, she and Riley Wattier, at the time an ex-boyfriend with whom she remained close, loaded up the van and took off on a 6,000-mile trip, just the two of them and Miko.

The first stop was a friend's wedding in Bozeman, Mont. A television at a bar showed the U.S. trials. Houlihan left and walked around the block, trying to compose herself.

"She was just a shell of a person," Wattier said. "She's in a room, but she's just not present."

They drove through Yellowstone, camped outside the Tetons and in Zion, stayed in Phoenix for the Fourth of July. They crashed at her parents' cabin for a month. Houlihan didn't run for three weeks, her longest break in a decade.

Houlihan grew up in a household of runners led by her mother, Connie, a professional distance runner who in the 1980s was among the first cohort of women allowed to compete in marathons. Connie ran daily when nine months pregnant, right up until the day before Shelby was born. Doctors told Connie years ago a knee injury would prevent her from running again. She still jogs more than an hour daily, logging between 12 and 18 miles on her Saturday long run. She always sprints the last mile.

"I don't know that she has the healthiest relationship with running, but she definitely loves it, and I feel like I watched that and I picked up a lot on that," Houlihan said. "It's kind of where I found the most confidence in myself as a person and where I felt like I belonged."

So even when Houlihan cannot compete, she has not stopped running. She ran (and won) an unsanctioned half-marathon last year and a 10,000-meter race in Okoboji. Shayla, her coach and sister, is friends with one of the owners of the Beer Mile World Classic, an event in which competitors chug a beer, run a lap and repeat until they have consumed four beers and run one mile. Houlihan and Shayla thought it would break up monotonous training and ease her back into the competitive spotlight. In Chicago, she ran the beer mile in 5:43 — the world record by 20 seconds.

As news spread online, Houlihan received some support and a barrage of criticism. To some, even though the beer mile is unsanctioned, she violated at least the spirit of her ban. In a sign of the awkwardness, event organizers recognized Houlihan's record but awarded the women's championship to another runner. Houlihan understood what the reaction would be, and she still posted a celebratory photo on her Instagram account.

By the conditions of her ban, Houlihan cannot train with teammates. At first, Schumacher agreed to coach her individually. It caused friction: Canadian runner Gabriela DeBues-Stafford left the team, citing stress from learning Houlihan had trained alongside her while provisionally suspended and Schumacher's continued work with Houlihan. Schumacher said he spoke with authorities to ensure he followed protocol.

This year, Houlihan began working with a sports psychologist to deal with the "fear and anxiety" she feels about returning to competition. Some competitors she once felt friendly with have turned away from her. Track fans have been scarred for decades by fraudulent performances, and many will not forgive a positive test.

"I couldn't imagine stepping onto a track at a big track meet and being okay," Houlihan said. "I want to get to a point where I can step on a track and not be bothered by everything that's happening. I don't want it to affect how I'm going to compete and how I perform. I'm sure people are going to have their opinions. They might boo at me on the track, and that's going to suck."

Houlihan's outlook has improved. The sports psychology courses have given her purpose. She cooks for her family. She is using time that otherwise would be spent preparing for elite races on camping and her travel bucket list. She has processed her ban in nonlinear fashion. She grapples with complex feelings. Guilt gnaws at her, and she has trouble identifying why.

"Because I'm serving the consequences for it, I'm also getting the emotions," Houlihan said. "I feel embarrassed, and I'm feeling ashamed, and all of these different emotions for having to serve a ban, even though I didn't do anything. So that's been really hard to navigate and work through."

Friends invited her on a European vacation this summer, and despite a financial crunch she accepted. Those friends, most of them runners, included the world championships on the itinerary — Houlihan will be in Budapest during the meet. She plans to stay far from the stadium.

"I don't feel ready to do that, and I don't need to put myself in that position," Houlihan said. "I'm going to explore Budapest."

Most days, she finds peace. She is closer to the end than the start. She can stand up for herself. She believes she will return to track's apex in 2025. But regardless of whether she deserves it, something always will be missing.

"The biggest shame in all of this is we'll never have got to see what she really could have done," Wattier said. "They took that from her, and she can't get that back. She will never ever really truly recover from this. It changed who she is. She's going to have a great life. If she comes back and runs, I hope she's going to light it on fire. I don't think people grasp what this means and what it is for someone's life. You don't get over this. It changed the whole direction of her life. Everything pivoted.

"Does it mean she can't have an amazing life on this new path? Absolutely not. But it changed for something she didn't do. She's going to talk to you and say all these amazing things, but there's this layer underneath that is always going to be sad. It's always going to be right under the surface, and anyone who's close to her is always to see that and notice. And that's a shame. An absolute shame."

Without reservation, Houlihan plans to return to elite running. For now, she must wait. She asks herself endless what-ifs: What if she had been tested on a different day? What if it had been a USADA test? What if she ate at a different food truck?

"Even the whole burrito thing, I don't even know if that's what happened," Houlihan said. "That was just, 'You have seven to 10 days to give us an answer why you had a positive test.' We're scrambling, trying to come up with the reason when we don't have answers. This is what we feel like makes the most sense. But we don't know. It could have been something completely different."

She was asked, hypothetically, what she would have thought in 2020 had another runner tested positive and used pork consumption as a defense.

"Honestly, I probably wouldn't have believed them," Houlihan said. "The way that I thought the system was set up was not at all what it actually is, which is why it was so hard to accept everything. I believed that if you're getting banned, there's got to be a reason. That was my belief about it until I went through the process and I saw how it was — how things were handled, how things weren't handled. Now I don't trust the system at all."

Houlihan still leans on the one thing she always has had, that nothing can take away. One morning early this month, she zapped her muscles with a massage gun and stretched on her parents' porch. The fog had started to lift over the lake, and she almost could see to the other side. Her shoes crunched over a gravel path. She reached the road and pushed a button on her watch. She ran.