really wrote:
I admittedly know and follow this stuff less than probably anyone commenting here and generally root for all Americans in championship races but... Does Engels really believe that Salazar was just trying to see how someone would react to being "brushed" with testosterone cream when he put it on his son??
Discussed to death in the other thread. It's one of those things that sounds like absolute horsesh1t.
Until we hear all the pieces of evidence that are 100% consistent with the story (Salazar expressing panic to several other people when Rupp mentioned being rubbed, immediately ordering the test to stop when it was clear cream wouldn't be able to sabotage, etc. ) and go back years in time and all consistent. In order to have not been the "sabotage defense" story, it would have had to have been masterminded going back years by Salazar, planting little seeds so that years later he could test the right amount of cream on his son. That's conspiracy theory level stuff. It would also require Salazar to be a criminal mastermind, something he is certainly not. He's not dumb, but he's far from a highly clever individual.
That alone makes an argument, and a compelling one, but Salazar's personality makes it, combined with the consistency of the evidence, easily believed. Throughough his life Salazar has been highly paranoid, and this perfectly matches this paranoia. If the story wasn't a multi year saga of consistency, or Salazar didn't have that paranoid personality spanning his whole life, I would scoff (as I initially did) at the theory.