For stretches of her four long years in running purgatory, the poster child for a drug-fighting system in sports that nobody truly understands was as likely to be seen driving her 1971 Volkswagen minibus across the country as working out on the track.
The US’ reigning 5,000m champion, Shelby Houlihan, used what is now known, infamously, as her “Burrito Ban” to scratch some things off her bucket list. She bought the burgundy bus — sight unseen — and logged an estimated 9,656km on a tour of the US.
“I thought, I didn’t have running to hold me back,” Houlihan said. “I’ve got to go do some fun things.”
Photo: AP
Now that her ban is expired, “fun” means rediscovering the purpose for all those kilometers she has piled up — not in the minibus, but over four years of running just to run.
Houlihan was entered in the 5,000m at the World Athletics Championships in Japan National Stadium, the place she was denied a chance to compete four years ago in the wake of a polarizing doping ban that took away not one, but two Olympics.
She last night qualified for the 5,000m final to be held tomorrow night. It is her first major outdoor track meet since she finished fourth in the 1,500m in Doha at the 2019 worlds.
Photo: Shelby Houlihan via AP
“Most people believe your prime is like 27 to 30 or 31, and those are the years that I missed,” said the 32-year-old Iowa native who lives out of a camper with her boyfriend, two dogs and a cat in Flagstaff, Arizona.
“I can’t do anything to get those back,” she said. “Part of me wonders what I could’ve done, but that’s a rabbit hole I don’t need to go down.”
She said she “blindly believed” in the global anti-doping system because, as she put it, “I knew I didn’t cheat.”
Then, it turned drastically and dramatically against her.
Four years after she made news of the ban public on the eve of the 2021 Olympic trials, there remain some who saw Houlihan improve drastically in the late 2010s and never believed her alibi for testing positive for a performance enhancer: that she ingested it by eating a drug-tainted pork burrito bought from a food truck.
Among those who did were the US Anti-Doping Agency, which tested her 53 times between 2017 and 2021 without turning up a positive.
“I don’t take supplements anymore. I drink Pedialyte and that’s about it,” she said. “The meat I eat, I freeze it just in case I get tested, and if I do get tested, that meat will sit in the freezer until I hear it’s a clean test. It’s not the way I like to live, but it’s the way I have to at this point.”
Additional reporting by staff writer
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