Meanwhile in Sports: Olympic Runner Blames Pork Burrito for Positive Steroid Test, Well Played Fellow Carnivore

You can’t blame a girl for obeying her craving for a burrito, especially not if she’s a professional runner. Athletes need those massive calorie and carb bombs wrapped in tinfoil to keep on shredding the asphalt and breaking records. But one Olympic hopeful was sidelined recently after eating a pork burrito and then testing positive for anabolic steroids.

Whether or not those two events are truly related is up for debate. But Shelby Houlihan, who has been suspended from her beloved sport for four years, claims her meal is to blame for the nandrolone found in her drug test.

How did she come to such an unusual conclusion? Well, in an Instagram post, she states that pig organ meat, or offal, can cause a false positive nandrolone result because certain types of pigs produce the substance naturally. Her assertion is actually backed by a study funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

In trying to figure out how she got a positive drug test from a Dec. 15, 2020 sample she provided, she reconstructed a food log for that week, and determined that it must have been the pork burrito she purchased from an authentic Mexican food truck near her home in Beaverton, Oregon, and consumed 10 hours before the drug test.

Now, that one little (or probably big) burrito has dashed her hopes of competing in the US Olympic Trials and the Tokyo Olympic Games.

“I feel completely devastated, lost, broken, angry, confused and betrayed by the very sport that I’ve loved and poured myself into just to see how good I was,” Houlihan said in her lengthy Instagram caption. “I want to be very clear. I have never taken any performance enhancing substances. And that includes that of which I am being accused.”

The burrito excuse sounds plausible enough, but…she received the positive drug test results on Jan. 14, 2021. That means she had to remember what she ate a whole month prior with painstaking detail. Can anybody do that? This is where we have to say the story sounds a little fishy…

Speaking of which, maybe stick to fish tacos from here on out, Shelby.

Cover Photo: Christian Petersen / Staff (Getty Images)

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