As I wrote, you spend enough time at the top and you know who is trustworthy and who to keep arm’s length. Who is honest and who’s a charlatan and a fraud.
On Rhonex, I have yet to see the specific case that the AIU is claiming against him, beyond irregularities in the ABP. At this moment, I’m not considering his group as a whole to be one of the suspect ones.
I did not expect Houlihan to test positive, but the rumours were flying that spring about a positive test coming from someone in Schumacher’s group. For Houlihan, her crucial issue was that she could not show any documentation that she purchased what she said she purchased. Testing positive for steroids after consumption of meat in certain parts of the world is a well known issue, such that Usada issued a warning to the Americans a number of years ago against eating food from Central America, against eating food outside an established restaurant versus a street vendor and to also maintain receipts of all food consumed:
Houlihan failed to follow any of those precautions. I find it very hard to believe that she was taking nandrolone as a performance enhancer. It is such an ancient, easily detectable steroid, it would be such a stupid choice of a performance enhancer. If someone in her position were making a concerted effort to go outside the rules, nandrolone would never enter her system. The isotope test on her sample demonstrated that the carbon-12 to carbon-13 ratio was in line with nandrolone that is found in pork products and samples of her hair showed no evidence of nandrolone consumption. But let this show the very high standard to which athletes are kept to today: Houlihan was a medal contender for the Americans and in a different time, it would have been nearly automatic for the American anti doping forces to just accept her explanation, as they had Dennis Mitchell’s absurd explanation for his positive test decades earlier. And yet they did not and instead ended her career.
To those who would claim that there would be numerous athletes testing positive from meat were that possible, it actually does happen, given the source of the meat. If an athlete chooses to holiday in Mexico, they had better keep their receipts because there’s a very real chance that they can test positive for a steroid used in meat production there.