This is incredibly sad. I want to believe her, but years of watching this sport tell me she’s probably lying. What a gut punch to the US CX community.
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Seriously sad.
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That’s a shame, I wonder if she has a dietician. If so it’s partly their fault for not being careful in what supplements she’s taking. I’m sure someone could elaborate more on the Importance of NSF certified supplements. I only know a little in that field but Either way it’s a shame.
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Mixed feelings about this as well. I want to believe her, and she was racing women who were absolutely doped up and never got caught, which is the whole problem with all this doping testing. The testing isn’t even across the board.
I’m curious about the levels. Like are her levels really performance enhancing or could it be “noise” from something she ate or was contaminated?
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I had the same question.
This kind of feels like a Jared Graves/Richie Rude type of situation but tough to know without more details.
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She was retiring end of this season anyway, I guess she can kick the legs up a few months early.
Exactly. You can buy the product that dinged them at like any Vitamin Shoppe or GNC and it’s on the shelf (not locked behind a case).
I’m in the camp of just because it is present at any dose, doesn’t mean it’s performance enhancing.
The way meat is here in the States, I’m sure most of us would be dinged for steroids after eating BBQ 
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On the supplement part: the only thing I can think of for a 100% clean athlete would be to save some portion of every supplement / protein powder / etc. that you take along with the bar code showing from the packaging into a container that contains dates / etc. So that if years later, you “fail” a test, you have samples of everything you took that could have been contaminated. This would be incredibly $ and resource intensive, but short of this, I don’t know how a 100% clean athlete could protect themselves.
This isn’t a comment either way on Katie Compton, but more of an extistential thought on how hard it would be if I was in this position.
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Except athletes have done that. It doesn’t matter. It’s unregulated and it’s “tough luck, it was there”.
This is why Phil Gaimon talked about how paranoid you have to be, to the point of practically never eating out, accepting food gifts (in his case cookies), etc.
It’s also been a criticism of WADA and USADA.
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You still might get a ban, but you would win in the court of popular opinion plus get a much reduced ban.
Otherwise, you are in the Katie Compton situation. Claiming innocence with no way to “prove” it was inadvertent instead of intentional.
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It depends.
Tom Danielson’s second ban was absolutely that (it was some stupid low number), and why Phil Gaimon (and others) came to his defense, but because of his history on the Postal Service team, he was / is never going to win the popular opinion argument and was made an example of.
Also, throwing stones, can put you in the same situation Katie finds herself in.
I’d argue that USADA needs to prove the presence of something actually is performance enhancing, which the presence of something doesn’t mean it is.
I say this knowing full well most of us would fail a USADA drug test based on supplements or medication we have or currently take. The fact that “no growth hormone” is a selling point for higher end meats is telling, and scary.
In remediation / water quality, they find stuff all the time because the lab machines are better, but if it’s below a certain value, it’s not harmful to humans. Drinking water isn’t “clean”, it’s just below health risk standards.
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I think you are misinformed about the realities of what specific “steroids” and the like are both approved and actually used in large scale animal raising/meat production here in the states… (I say this while also of course acknowledging as an aside that the food system in general is quite broken in many ways).
Also, saying that “most of us would fail a USADA…” seems like a bold statement, but perhaps I am naive? No doubt that there have been contamination issues with things as common/benign as creatine powder, but are you saying that you believe there are contaminants in common sports things like energy/carb gels too?
Regarding the example of water quality… the common saying “dose makes the poison” comes to mind.
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Alberto Contador claimed it was from steak…
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The runner who recently got banned claimed it was from pork, and used her food logs as evidence to no avail. The background info is interesting.
Dosage makes the poison, but WADA and USADA has standards where the presence of something, at any dose, is a fail.
Example of how screwed up the supplement world is:
That aged well…
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Yeah, sorry Katie……
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Tainted supplements might cut it as an excuse for amateurs, but if you’re a pro you should know by now to stick to supplements from companies like SiS that actually test their supplements to ensure they are clean.
Tainted meat full of steroids? I have no idea of the realities of that. Have there been any studies?
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The runner-pork situation had me curious so I read some online articles about it (I cannot attest to the quality of the various sources included the one you linked). My sniff-test-ometer thinks it would be an incredibly unfortunate coincidence that the athlete claims to have happened to eat the offal tacos shortly before the random test… and there seems to be no actual proof of ingestion of said tacos beyond a mention of a self recorded log?
Also, I am not too familiar with that specific compound in question, but the articles mentioned that it was naturally occurring in animals anyway, so perhaps that addresses some specific concerns about food animals being loaded up with artificially steroids? But also there were loose uncited references to it being concentrated in offal, which also raises some alarms for me as offal is a broad category of various organs, and it is unlikely that all parts of a pig which can be classified as offal and are also used in making tacos have equal amounts if any of it all.
Kinda rambly but if the two options are “it came from tacos” or “I took it (perhaps not knowingly/intentionally)”, the simpler (latter) of the two seems more likely to me.
Compton and Houlihan both got 4 year bans. When an athlete gets a 4 year ban, doesn’t that usually mean that it was a pretty convincing case?
It seems like for minor infractions athletes often get 6 month or 1 year bans, sometimes over the off-season so they barely miss a beat.