On June 14, american mid-distance runner Shelby Hollyhan received a desperate news that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld her four-year ban, which took effect on the 14th, which means that Hollyhan cannot participate in the U.S. Olympic Trials on Friday, a four-year ban that will also allow her to miss the two Olympic Games in Tokyo and Paris and the 2022 World Championships. In response, Hollyhan insisted that she had mistakenly taken the forbidden medicine while eating Mexican pork rolls.
Hollyhan, 28, competed at the 2016 Rio Olympics, holding the domestic record for the U.S. 1,500m and 5,000m races, and in 2018 she became the second female athlete in history to win two distance events at the U.S. Outdoor Athletics Championships. At the 2019 World Championships, Hollyhan finished fourth in the 1500m. As a result, she is seen as a powerful shocker of Olympic medals. However, the report of a positive test for the drug has made her training and preparation for several years in vain.
Hollyhan tested positive on an out-of-game urine test by the International Anti-Doping Organization (WADA) on December 15 last year, and the banned substance that tested positive was nandrolone, an androgenic and anabolic steroid whose effects were known to include increased muscle mass. After receiving a positive test report on Jan. 14, Hollyhan insisted he had never taken the substance.
Shelby Hollyhan:
That email, I read no less than 10 times, the substance that made me test positive, I only knew what it was after searching online, I had never even heard of nandrolone before.
HollyHan and her team then made a food list detailing what she had eaten in the week before she was tested. After recalling and analyzing, the team believes that the problem occurred on the Mexican pork burritos that Hollyhan bought from a food truck in front of her home, and holly han ate the set of pork burritos the night before the test, about 10 hours before the test. WADA documents show that eating meat, especially pig offal, may lead to the detection of nandrolone.
After receiving a positive result, Hollyhan received a temporary suspension notice for a period of 3 months. In order to prove her innocence, she chose to go to the International Court of Arbitration for Sport to hold a hearing, during which she also tried to prove herself through hair sample testing and lie detectors. Unfortunately, from the final result, these efforts were in vain, and Holly Han was eventually banned for 4 years, which will make her miss a series of important events such as the Olympic Games and the World Championships, and her career is in jeopardy.
On the night of receiving the punishment result, HollyHan posted a long article on her personal social account, she emotionally said that when she began running at the age of 5, she would become a professional runner, set a record, and win gold in the Olympic Games as a dream, and over time, she loved the sport more and gained joy from constantly exploring her potential. In Hollyhan's view, her original intention in running the sport was just to see where her limits were, she did not run for honor, not for money, nor for fame, so she said that she would never cheat, and she had never taken anything that could improve her performance, including the Nandrolone she was accused of taking.
For now, Hollyhan doesn't know where his career will go. Her team said it was considering an appeal to the Swiss Federal Court.