SHELBY HOULIHAN will not race at the Tokyo Olympics after blaming a dodgy pork burrito for her positive drugs test.
The US middle-distance runner was banned for four years by the Athletics Integrity Unit following a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling after a presence of anabolic steroid nandrolone was discovered in a doping sample.
The 28-year-old denies any wrongdoing and reckons the adverse finding may have come from eating contaminated meal the night before her test.
Houlihan said: “I feel completely devastated, lost, broken, angry, confused and betrayed by the very sport that I’ve loved and poured myself into.
“I want to be very clear. I have never taken any performance-enhancing substances.
“I have since learned that it has long been understood by WADA that eating pork can lead to a false positive for nandrolone – since certain types of pigs produce it naturally in high amounts.
“Pig organ meat has the highest levels of nandrolone.
“In the following five days after being notified, I put together a food log of everything that I consumed the week of that December 15 test.
“We concluded that the most likely explanation was a burrito purchased and consumed approximately 10 hours before that drug test from an authentic Mexican food truck that serves pig offal near my house in Beaverton, Oregon.
“I notified the AIU that I believed this was the source.”
CASINO SIGN UP OFFER: GET £10 FREE BONUS WITH NO DEPOSIT REQUIRED
Houlihan insisted: “I did everything I could to prove my innocence.
“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 build up of this substance in my body, which there would have been if I were taking it regularly.”
Source: Athletics - thesun.co.uk
