Despite incurring a four-year doping ban from track and field, Shelby Houlihan will apparently race at the Olympic Trials, which begin on Friday. The 28-year-old is listed as a participant in two events that start Friday, the women’s 1,500 and 5,000 meters.
Houlihan and her coaches and lawyer have gone all-out claiming that the amount of steroids in her urine was caused by pig organs from an “authentic Mexican food truck.”
“Given there is an active appeal process, USATF will allow any athletes to continue competing until the process is completed,” a USA Track & Field spokesman said in a statement.
“You can always resolve the outcome later, but you can’t re-run a race,” USATF CEO Max Siegel told the Associated Press.
This raises significantly more questions than it answers. The first one: What active appeal process?
Houlihan’s lawyer, Paul Greene, has said that anti-doping authorities agreed to hold a single hearing earlier this year to expedite her case ahead of the Trials and Olympics.
Houlihan will not be the only athlete competing at the Trials while contesting a doping ban. Rio hurdles gold medalist Brianna Rollins McNeal recently received a five-year ban and is slated to run, but the difference between her case and Houlihan’s is that Rollins McNeal is actively appealing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Houlihan’s team has said that her CAS case is exhausted. In media appearances this week, Houlihan and Greene have said that the only avenue remaining would be the Swiss courts, which they have not yet begun to pursue.
CAS appeals to the Swiss Federal Tribunal are rare and time-consuming. For example, when CAS banned Caster Semenya from the women’s 800 meters in May 2019, she was not able to compete in the event, and she lost at Switzerland’s top court more than a year later.
Greene and USA Track & Field did not immediately respond to messages about the appeals process on Thursday.
Assuming Houlihan does race in Eugene, Ore., this week, there are even more urgent questions. In the 5000 meters, for example, 16 women advance from the semifinal to the final. Houlihan, the American record holder in the event, would almost certainly advance to the final. Does the 17th finisher lodge a protest and run the final under protest, in the way Houlihan is competing at this meet in the first place?
And then on to the final. While USATF has decided that Houlihan can compete at its trials, it’s not at all clear what would happen if she finished in the top three and “clinched” a spot at the Tokyo Olympics. While Houlihan could seek some kind of injunction against one or all of the International Olympic Committee, World Athletics, or the Athletics Integrity Unit, the fourth-place finisher very well could battle USATF for a spot on the team.
USATF and the Athletics Integrity Unit, the anti-doping body that handled Houlihan’s case, did not immediately respond to questions about the Olympics on Thursday.
