Like many women, I have struggled with body image and weight issues for a good part of my life. I was an athletic kid and teenager. I became pregnant at 20, and found myself weighing in at 200 lbs. by the end of my pregnancy. I dieted down to 98 lbs., which also wasn't healthy. I had thought I finally found a happy medium when I stumbled upon "physique" sports. Little did I know my journey into competitive bodybuilding and striving for a healthy lifestyle would almost kill me.

I use the term "physique sports" to encompass bikini, fitness, figures, physique and bodybuilding. There are subtle differences between each competitive class. Bikini girls are the ones seen in most of the fitness magazines. They have a nice 6 pack, and a tight and toned athletic look. Fitness and figures girls are more muscular, with deeper separation between muscles, and a bit more of a "jacked' look. Bodybuilders pack on as much muscle as they can, and looked striated, vascular, shredded or ripped and physique is somewhere between bodybuilding and figures. Looking at the women bodybuilders, you can kind of tell they must be doing something to enhance their physique, but I was shocked to learn how many fitness and bikini girls were also using physique enhancing drugs, or steroids to be exact!

I went into my first show "natural," which in physique sports means on a strict regimen of working out 6 times a week, eating 7 meals a day, doing over 10 hours of cardio a week and taking a "pharmacy" of over the counter supplements, fat burners and vitamins. I placed second. I had coaches and other girls at my gym, trainers, friends, even my spouse tell me I would have won if I had just a little more muscle. So when I was offered a magic pill that would help me put on a bit of muscle while not gain any fat, it seemed too good to be true! Of course, I didn't want to do steroids. So I ventured into the "grey area"… M1T, Anadrol, Yohimbe, a little Clenbuterol and T3, as well as caffeine and ephedrine. Yeah, none of that is real "steroids" in the physique world; I mean it wasn't like I was sticking needles in myself or anything, right? The "grey area" got darker and darker.

When I lost my sight, I didn't believe the doctor telling me that steroids were the cause. Yeah, you read that right. I lost my sight. I developed a disease called Central serous retinopathy. The doctor told me SCR often could affect young men with a type A personality under stress who use steroids. I went to the source of all knowledge on everything, the internet! I could find absolutely no proof that steroids were affecting my vision. As a matter of fact, all the internet experts (guys on bodybuilding sites) were pretty adamant that steroids couldn't possibly be the cause. Especially not with the low doses I was doing!

In March 2011 I entered and won my first bodybuilding show. I went from being 108 lbs. to competing at 120 pounds of muscle, completely lean and at 8% body fat. But then I lost my job, my family my sight and most of my friends. I was aggressive, anxious, argumentative and angry. I decided the only thing to do, was to win a BIGGER show, and to do that, I had to get BIGGER too! By June 2011, I was sticking needles into myself.

My first shot was a deca/tren stack. It was scary. I didn't know anything about shooting steroids. I went on a steroid site online, and grabbed my eyeliner, and marked an X on my deltoid. Then I loaded my pin, and stuck it in. It was easier than I thought. This was the dosage given to me by my coach at the time. His wife was taking the same dosage; she still looked like a girl, so of course it would be safe. My muscles increased at about the same rate as my temper. I became more and more reclusive. I had moved clear across the country, and separated myself from almost all my friends. I hated people questioning me about my size, yeah, I was bulking, yeah I was getting stronger, yeah, of COURSE I'm natural. See in the physique world, the only thing worse than doing steroids, is admitting you do them. Along with an increase in mass, was a decrease in my vision. My sight was getting worse. I started seeing a doctor in Toronto at Sunnybrook hospital. He was one of the leading retinal specialists in the country. He expressed concern about my vision disorder, usually what I had cleared up in 6 weeks, I had it for over a year, and it was getting worse. I was developing cysts on my other eye and had light sensitivity. I was going to lose my drivers license.

By August 2011, my health went from bad to worse. I could no longer make it up a flight of stairs without having to stop to catch my breath. Even some of the bodybuilders from the internet sites were starting to get concerned for me. None of them would admit steroids might be causing the problems, but a few said I might want to scale things back a bit. I started working with a new coach and he switched up my cycle. Put me on more steroids… I was now taking growth hormone, along with 3 different injectable steroids, and a high dose of oral steroids every day. There was also a new peptide I was advised to try called IGF1. I still don't know what it is supposed to do, but hey, bigger is better, right? I also took another peptide called MT2. It keeps you tanned.  It also made me nauseous, and groggy, and itchy, but hey I was jacked and tanned.

Now I have to point out, I was working out hard. I was getting super strong. It was a big joke that I was lifting more than most guys in the gym. I bench pressed 205 lbs. (actually did 225 with a spotter), leg press with 720 lbs. One time I was squatting, it was a light weight, only 185 lbs., from the bottom of the squat when I was pushing back up to a standing position, the cyst in my eye popped. I had bloody fluid literally fill my eye. The pressure was crazy; I remember falling in the squat rack, with 185 on my back, and the only thing I felt was mad that I failed. The drive to push through, toughen up – MAN UP – was so part of the lingo we spoke every day; it became who I was, all I was. I was lifting on a 5 day split… sometimes 6 days a week. I was measuring all my food, doing what I'd always done, but the weight would not drop off me. I kept bloating, holding water, my lungs were watery. My voice was shot, I convinced myself it was the air conditioning… no matter what my body threw at me, I made up a "reason" it was happening. Anything except admitting the steroids MIGHT have something to do with it.

I had joint pains, a torn bicep tendon, my carpals were shot. I had to strap and wrap myself up like a mummy before lifting anything. My hip was out of whack, I was suffering sciatica. When my face exploded, I still didn't think it might be steroids. You see, my body had become toxic. My moles started exploding. I went to the emergency room once and was told it appeared I was suffering from "some skin abnormality." I had back acne and was starting to get hairy. I could no longer sleep, the insomnia was crazy, I was taking sleeping pills, and pain killers at night… then Clenbuterol and caffeine all day… when I did sleep, however fleeting, I had to prop myself up on pillows, when I lay down flat, my lungs would fill up and id start choking. I started getting nosebleeds at about this time, and coughing blood… and bleeding from my rectum. None of my clothes fit. My arms were 14.5 cm and I needed a size extra large shirt to fit over them. My hair on my head started falling out, so did my eyebrows. I hadn't had a menstrual cycle in over 2 years. I didn't even know if I was still "female" or not. I was lost and questioning everything. I was not only aggressive in the gym, but everywhere else too. I was pumping more hormones into me than most boys in puberty, and was dealing with a lot of the same aggression issues, including sexual aggression. It was taking over my thoughts. The guys on message boards joke that this is a positive side effect from the "gear." Many of them said this is why they give their wives a shot once in a while… or have their "old lady" on GH… there was no love… just a preoccupation with sex.

Late October I quit taking all gear. My daughter and I got into an argument. She was pregnant, I was a jerk, we fought, she told me to stop doing all "that crap" or she would leave and I'd never see her or meet my grandchild.

So I quit cold turkey. The depression that followed was almost unbearable. My nerves were shot. I would shake, just couldn't control the shaking, or the shivering. I would cry at the drop of a pin, just start bawling, and still, anger. I was on a very short fuse. It was like every horror story of PMS gone completely to the power of 100! I was completely body dysmorphic.

By the grace of God, I survived the depression, the turmoil, and the insecurities. I wrapped myself so tightly in work that I didn't leave myself any time to get depressed. I was working 60 hr. weeks, and training for bodybuilding on top. I literally was running myself to exhaustion so I didn't have time to think about how sad I was. I physically craved the needle. My hormones were altered, I put a foreign substance into my body, and became not only addicted to the rush, the narcissism, the invincible feelings but was psychologically addicted to the POWER that the steroids gave me. If I was strong, they made me stronger. If I was angry they made me angrier. The desire to be MORE, to be the Best. If I was Hard, the steroids made me harder. Without the MORE… I was only left with "less". Helpless. Useless. Hopeless.

I'm coming forward with my story for a few reasons. Steroids and physique enhancing substances have very little scientific research. One argument I heard was "steroids aren't addictive, there is no proof". Well… there is also no proof that they are NOT addictive. I feel they are. I smoked back in the 80's; I quit in the 90's. It was no problem for me to quit. However, if you ask smokers and scientists, nicotine is an addictive substance. Research NEEDS to be done on anabolic steroids, not just in men, but also in women. Research not only on the addictive qualities of steroids, but on the long term side effects of short term, long term AND prolonged usage.

I believe that within the physique sports community, steroid use is rampant, not only for men, but for women. A recent magazine published Canada's Hottest and Fittest 100 females. I know FOR CERTAIN seven of those women have used anabolic steroids. These are Bikini models, not even bodybuilders! These are the pretty girls on magazine covers, like Oxygen, or Hers. These are the women our daughters are looking up to as a "healthy" physique. These women are the ones you see when you are in the grocery store line, and you follow their 7-day total transformation diets and can't figure out why it doesn't work for you. These women are cheating, and killing themselves and don't even know it. I would be willing to estimate, that at top levels in the physique world, 80% of the women are using "banned" substances, with 60% having used steroids. Growth Hormone is the drug of choice in Physique.

I am now one year off steroids. Most days I am proud of myself. Most days I am confident in my strength. My hair has grown back. My body is healing. My vision has returned to normal. The cysts are gone from my eyes. I can run 5 km without losing my breath or coughing blood. My skin is smooth and soft. My menstrual cycles have returned. Most days I can live with my voice, which has been permanently altered because of my steroid abuse. Most days my bicep tendon pain is bearable. Most days I feel good. Every once in a while, I see the peach fuzz which started growing on my cheek. Every once in a while, I realize I have to draw eyebrows on me. I can't sing my grand daughter a lullaby because my voice is still damaged, and some days, that really hurts. Some days my joint pains make me lose sleep. Some days I look at my body and see less muscle, and feel less me. Some days I don't know what defines me; I was "bodybuilder" for so long. Some days I look in the mirror and see the damage I did to my body and wonder, will anyone ever be able to see past it all and love me? How do I meet a man and tell him I injected male hormones into my body? Most days I'm ok. Some days I'm sad. Every day I am thankful for.

My husband, Bill Brotherton, committed suicide on Oct. 10, by jumping in front of a Metrolink train just south of Dana Point, where we lived.

What could cause someone to do this??

By all accounts, he had a good life and should have been happy.

We had been married seven years. We were both in the fitness industry. Bill had been a competitive body builder for years, and opened his  gym, Headlands Fitness , shortly after he moved to Dana Point. I owned the Sweat Shop and Xhale Pilates.  After we got married, we combined our businesses into a new gym, Pulse Fitness, which we successfully ran for four and a half years.

In early 2011, we received an offer to purchase Pulse Fitness, and we sold the business, but continued to work there as trainers. We bought a vacation condo on the beach in Rosarito, Mexico, where we spent most weekends relaxing and enjoying the amazing ocean views, the food and the people in Baja.

Because of the tough economy in the U.S., the fitness business was rather slow in Dana Point, and in October 2011, we decided to move into our Rosarito condo full time and build up our Pilates and personal training businesses in Baja.   Although the move was more of an adjustment than we'd expected, over our first three months in Baja, we came to enjoy and appreciate the slower and simpler lifestyle.

Then, in January, something in Bill seemed to snap. He experienced severe anxiety and insomnia, at one point not sleeping for four consecutive days, constantly pacing around the condo. He shouted, cried, and threatened to jump off the building. Friends of ours recommended a local psychologist, and the initial visits seemed to help somewhat.

Bill learned breathing techniques to help calm himself. But over the next two months, he still couldn't sleep, and the pacing continued, accompanied by a constant muttering to himself and bizarre arm and hand movements as though he were picking things out of the air.  He'd lost about 30 pounds by then, and it was obvious that he desperately needed help.

We moved back to Dana Point, and saw a succession of doctors, therapists and counselors. Bill was put on many different medications. Although some medications finally allowed him to sleep, his depression became increasingly severe.

He often mentioned suicide, and was hospitalized briefly after a suicide attempt with sleeping pills. I pleaded with the hospital to keep him and told them that he badly needed help. However, he was released after one night on suicide watch, since in the morning he "wasn't suicidal."

The next six months were a living hell for both of us. Bill could manage to get up early in the morning and go to the gym to work out and train his one or two clients. He'd then return home to our apartment, where he spent the rest of the day.

On weekends he didn't have clients, so he never left the apartment. He became irritable and critical of everything I did. He saw only the negative in everything.  Apart from his training, he avoided people. I began to stay at work longer, take more time to run errands or go for runs, just to avoid spending time in the apartment alone with him.

Then, he began accusing me of having an affair and having another apartment where I met my supposed lover. As his paranoia increased, he accused me of secretly draining our joint bank accounts and taking the money for myself and "my boyfriend."

But despite all of this, Bill could rally when he needed to. His friends had no idea what he was going through and Bill would have been horrified had anyone found out. When his parents came to visit from Texas for eight days in July, Bill picked them up from their hotel every day, showed them around and had lunch and dinner with them. Although he was quieter than normal at these times, someone who didn't know him well would never have realized that there was a problem.

He killed himself 10 months after his initial breakdown in January.

I'll never truly knew what was going on inside his head or how he could have hated himself and life so much to do what he did. I'd always suspected that Bill's use of anabolic steroids when he was a body builder might have impacted his health. But after researching the effects of steroids and other drugs, he'd taken earlier in his life, I was absolutely stunned. I'm convinced that Bill's illness was caused in large part by his years of drug use.

As a body builder, Bill took anabolic steroids for 10 years. And as is common with steroid users, once he quit steroids, he moved on to another drug (in his case, GHB) to combat the anxiety, insomnia and irritability resulting from steroid use. He used GHB for seven years, sipping it in a drink throughout the day. He had to stop GHB after it became illegal, but suffered from anxiety and insomnia.

So he started what became long term use of benzodiazepenes. He took Halcion and Nyquil every night for seven years, switching to Xanax (multiple doses nightly) when we were in Mexico, because the Halcion he purchased didn't seem to work. None of these drugs were prescribed by a doctor or taken under a doctor's supervision.

Doctors are just now seeing the results of long-term use of anabolic steroids, as athletes who used them in the 1970s and 80s are reaching middle age. Most people are familiar with the term "roid rage," when users become angry and violent while on steroids. But the long term effects can be even more deadly.   Current literature indicates that steroid use can cause both physical damage, such as heart disease and liver failure, as well as long term psychiatric problems, including anxiety and depression.

The research on GHB is equally frightening. It is considered highly addictive.  The greatest immediate risk is death from overdose, but even regular low dose use has devastating side effects, including unrelenting anxiety, depression and insomnia.

During the years we were married, Bill got several phone calls from "Big Phil," a friend from his body building days, reporting on the deaths of several of their mutual friends at relatively young ages. Bill refused to talk to him or return his calls. I now vividly recall one of Big Phil's messages:  "Dude, all of our friends are dying!"

Then finally, Bill got a message from Big Phil's daughter: Big Phil had committed suicide.

I'm telling my story because I want to educate young people on these drugs in order to prevent more needless suffering and death. Steroid use has increased over the years, and is now all too common, even among high school athletes.   And GHB is a casually used, easily accessible "club drug."

My message is:

• Don't use them! 

• Educate yourself and your friends on the adverse effects of these drugs. They are serious and potentially life-threatening.

• If you're already taking these drugs, find a doctor or clinic that specializes in drug abuse and get help to get off them. Quitting cold turkey can be very dangerous, and you may need tmporary treatment with other drugs, so do it under a doctor's supervision. 

• Don't think something like this can't happen to you- before this year, I would never have believed this could happen to my husband, who seemed to be the picture of good health.     

I can't bring my husband back, but if I can stop others from destroying their lives in the same way, at least his death will have resulted in some good.

http://lagunaniguel-danapoint.patch.com/articles/wife-links-steroid-and-ghb-use-to-husband-s-suicide#photo-12427763

Tammy Thomas mounted the podium after winning the 500-meter Olympic cycling time trial in Frisco, Texas.

A muscular athlete with quiet determination, the Yazoo City native had just bested fellow cyclist Chris Witty in the quest to compete in the 2000 Summer Olympics. It's a quest she'd ultimately lose, but Thomas didn't know that at the time.

She smiled and laced an arm around Witty as they posed for photos. It was April 29, 2000. Thomas wore her signature red nail polish - the only tangible evidence of her womanhood.

Thomas, then 30 years old, looked like a man.

Her muscular arms and legs bulged beneath the tight fabric of her race uniform, and an Adam's apple appeared on her neck. Hair grew where it shouldn't, and, where it should, it began to recede. Her jaw line broadened. Her voice deepened.
Her body thickened.

Hers was a body built by steroids. They were meant to make Thomas faster and more competitive, but they ultimately robbed her of her Olympic dreams, banned her forever from the sport she loves and left her with chronic health problems and an uncertain future.

Thomas "sometimes seemed trapped in her own body," Witty said, "when deep down she was just a polite Southern girl from Mississippi."

Now 43 and living in Ridgeland, Thomas still endures the consequences of a past she insists wasn't entirely her fault. She trusted the wrong people, she says, and it cost her everything.

Thomas was young and naïve when she entered the fast-paced world of competitive cycling; a small-town Mississippi girl raised on family values and the Bible and suddenly thrust into a world that operated by a different set of standards.

Coaches eclipsed preachers, practice became prayer and Olympic gold took the place of salvation as the ultimate objective. Thomas was as an obedient adherent of this new world as she had been in the old; she did what she was told.

Thomas says she fell victim to sustained sexual abuse at the hands of her coaches, one of whom introduced her to performance-enhancing drugs, while USA Cycling and the U.S. Olympic Committee ignored and even encouraged the pattern.

"They should have been more concerned about my health back then instead of winning a medal," Thomas says. "And they should take responsibility for what they did. At the very least, they should help me overcome all this so I can have a normal life."

USA Cycling and the USOC denied Thomas' allegations, though the USOC said it has and will continue to provide her assistance.

Sitting at a café one day in January, the 5-foot-7-inch brunette cradles her coffee. She is slim, attractive and outwardly fit; her masculine features having long since recessed but for the permanently raspy voice.

She tells her story. It's one of sadness and betrayal.

Repeated steroid abuse ended her cycling career and thrust her into one of the biggest doping scandals in U.S. history - the BALCO affair - which ultimately branded her a felon and crushed her nascent dreams of becoming an attorney.

Physically, she's weaker than her elderly parents because of her body's deterioration from long-term doping, even though she hasn't used performance-enhancing drugs in more than a decade. She faces even graver steroid-induced health effects as she ages.

The combination of both steroids and sexual trauma plagues her with chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety and sleep disorders.

To cope, Thomas swallows an assortment of prescribed medications. But lack of health insurance requires she often skimp on her pharmaceutical regimen. It's too expensive to support, she says; one prescription alone costs $230 per month.

She can't afford the kind of intensive therapy she say she needs, so she battles her demons alone.

Without consistent medication or professional help, Thomas can't excel at work. She runs a solo venture called MS Pro Fitness that offers personal training and boot camps, but it barely pays the bills.

If she were healthy, she could grow her business and be successful. But she's not, and she can't.

A natural athlete

Born in January 1970 and raised in a Southern Baptist home, Thomas was the second child of Billy and Gwen Thomas of Yazoo City.

Unlike her older sister, Chandra, Thomas was a tomboy. Her athletic talent emerged early, and she easily excelled in every sport she tried - softball, basketball, track and field. She also could outrun almost any boy in Yazoo City.
When she wasn't attending the private Manchester Academy, Thomas was in the pew at First Baptist Church or playing outdoors.

Former classmate and neighbor Steven Brister remembers riding go-carts one day with Thomas and two boys from the seventh grade. The group approached a mud hole and everyone came to a stop. It was too deep, they figured. They'd have to find another route.

Without a word, Thomas gunned her engine and plowed through the pit while the three boys hung back in awe.

Brister laughed at the memory and said, "She would do anything to prove she was tough and one of the guys."

Tough, he said, but also quiet. Thomas earned a reputation for being shy but friendly. She never caused trouble, never brought attention to herself, always did what she was told.

The only time she stood out, former friends recall, was while competing athletically. Thomas amazed everyone with her talent.

"Some people are just more driven than the rest of us, and she really found her area," said Lynn Henderson Oldshue, who grew up with Thomas. "She found joy in that."

She still does.

On a mild January evening, Thomas stands in Ridgeland's Freedom Ridge Park conducting one of her boot camps. She exudes a calm, cheery confidence as she guides three female participants through a series of grueling exercises.

Thomas shouts encouragement as the women jog around the softball field and then return to their mats.

"Come on, don't give up," she barks at one of them trying to complete a round of 50 sit-ups. It's a serious command but offers a hint of compassion. It also works: The woman forces herself through the last dozen or so repetitions and collapses on her mat.

Thomas smiles. She clearly wants her clients to succeed and has staked her reputation on it.

"Train with a champion," proclaims her MS Fitness Pro website, which boasts "the most advanced, innovative and outside-the-box workouts in the Jackson metro area."

Even though steroids impaired her ability to work out, helping others excel athletically brings her joy. In these moments, she says, everything is OK. She can be herself.

"It's pretty much the highlight of my day when I train people," Thomas says. "Just knowing I've helped clients reach their goals makes me feel good."

The rest of the time, Thomas wallows in an uncertain place between the anguish of her past and the promises of a future she can imagine but not yet touch.

Until she resolves the one, she cannot obtain the other. But she has been paralyzed in her tracks.

An intensely private woman, Thomas has spent the past decade hiding her deepest wounds. She masks them with an outwardly strong persona that, like the go-cart stunt, leaves everyone in awe.

She's a champion cyclist, a law school graduate, a business owner and a woman of God.

"She's great," said Stephanie Powell, president of the Jackson Metro Cyclists, with which Thomas was affiliated for a short time. "She's got a gift for what she does."

But Thomas is tired of pretending. For the first time ever, she's ready to talk about what really happened during her years as an elite cyclist. Maybe then, she says, she can move on.

The critical juncture

Thomas' life went astray shortly after graduating with a degree in fitness management from Mississippi State University. It was 1992. As a present to herself, she bought a pricey mountain bike and moved to Florida.

That's where she met her first cycling coach, Carlos Laborde.

Around 1995, Laborde convinced Thomas, then in her mid-20s, to exchange her mountain bike for a racing model and enter the field of competitive speed cycling. Under his guidance, she began an intense regimen of working out and dieting that included a cocktail of nutritional supplements.

The coach also introduced Thomas to performance-enhancing drugs, she says, but Laborde denies this. He never was charged with facilitating her doping.

Even Thomas had exonerated Laborde in a Sept. 10, 2000, letter to the The Clarion-Ledger newspaper. But that was when Thomas says she was still under his influence and afraid to speak out.

Laborde said he has fond memories of his days with Thomas and calls her a stellar athlete.

"I never met somebody who loved cycling so much," Laborde said. "She never wasted a day. She used to come to the velodrome (cycle racing track), even when it was raining, then waited until it dried."

As a coach and a friend, Laborde said he did everything to help Thomas, even letting her live in his home and cooking her meals. She became a member of his family, he said.

But Thomas remembers a darker side to those happy days.

At some point, Thomas said, Laborde began sexually abusing her. It started with a sports massage meant to sooth her overworked muscles and eventually devolved into what she says was sustained, unwanted contact.

Laborde confirmed the affair but said it was entirely consensual. Afterward, he said, the two remained friends and continued their training.

The intimacy was consensual, Thomas said, only in the sense Laborde held the power to advance her dream and she trusted him implicitly. Laborde told her what to eat; she ate it. He told her to dope; she did it. He told her to undress; she shed it.

Although she never filed charges against Laborde, Thomas says the intimacy consumed every aspect of her being until she felt less human than a marionette.

Unwanted intimate contact is all too common in elite sports, said Sandra Kirby, a former Olympic rower and dean of graduate studies at the University of Winnipeg in Canada.

"Those athletes don't have a choice," Kirby said. "If someone puts sexual abuse in front of them, those athletes have to deal with it to stay on that road. It just takes one little thing, and you're gone. That's it for that Olympic dream."

In some cases, the victims cringe while silently enduring the sexual encounters. In other cases, the athletes idolize their coaches and willingly submit. Both scenarios, experts say, are inappropriate.

Thomas says she encountered further unwanted sexual contact from her second coach, Desmond Dickie, whom she met around late 1998 or early 1999.

Though Thomas never filed any complaints against him, Dickie had faced criminal allegations of sexual abuse in Canada, where he ran the national cycling team track programs. Two of his female athletes claimed he'd touched them inappropriately during one-on-one training sessions in 1993. Other women he trained also came forward during the investigation, all alleging similar experiences.

He was acquitted in 1996, but the judge said he doubted Dickie's innocence and that, had he been convicted, "a long term in prison would be well deserved," according to media reports at the time.

Soon afterward, USA Cycling hired Dickie to assist training the national team, of which Thomas was a part.

The female cyclist had no idea of his past. But USA Cycling did, says Laura Robinson, a freelance journalist and former member of Canada's national cycling team.

Robinson said she went to USA Cycling's headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo., and demanded to know why it hired Dickie despite his background of sexual exploitation. She said she was told to leave immediately.

"They knew," she said, "they just didn't want to talk about it."

It's true USA Cycling knew about Dickie, said the organization's attorney, Stephen Hess. "Everybody in the cycling world knew about Des Dickie. It was big news when it happened in Canada," Hess said. But "he was acquitted."

Dickie now coaches in Trinidad and didn't respond to emails seeking comment. He could not be reached by phone.

For his part, Laborde said he never exploited Thomas. He cared about her and worried about her reliance on performance-enhancing drugs, which he says he asked her to stop taking.

"She looked like a man," he said. "She had hair on her chest."

Chris Witty had heard about Thomas' physique but, until that April day in 2000, had never gotten close enough to see for herself.

There, on the podium, she noticed the 5-o'clock shadow hugging Thomas' face. It confirmed rumors whispered among elite cyclists worldwide - Thomas doped to improve performance, and repeated use of the steroid drugs had transformed the once feminine athlete into an abnormality - freakishly strong and fast.

For this, Thomas had become the butt of jokes among her peers. They whispered behind her back and stared at her at competitions.

"You could see from the expression on her face and the way she turned her head away that she knew what they were saying," Witty said. "She knew she looked different."

Seven weeks later, the two faced off again, this time in Mexico City. And, again, Thomas won. The back-to-back victories should have assured her a spot on the Olympic cycling team, but a different fate awaited.

"After I crossed the finish line," Witty said, "the coach immediately told me it didn't matter because Tammy had already tested positive."

Thomas wasn't alone in doping. Many cyclists pushed the limits, doping just enough to improve performance without getting caught. "If a speed limit is 65," Laborde said, "you know if you go 64 you won't get a ticket."

But the traffic cops of competitive sports were more lax in the late 1990s and early 2000. This was before the creation of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, an autonomous body that tests athletes, imposes punishments and has cracked down on some of the most flagrant abuses.

Back then, the U.S. Olympic Committee was responsible for testing and reporting results to the governing sports authorities. Those authorities then determined the outcome, said former USOC Executive Director Baaron Pittenger.

Then, as now, athletes can challenge positive test results. But the lack of an independent anti-doping agency created conflicts of interest, and many athletes got off with little more than warnings.

"It was the fox guarding the chicken coup," Witty said.

Wade Exum, the Olympic Committee's former director of drug control administration, alleged numerous such instances. When he resigned in 2000 after one decade on the job, Exum accused his former employer of "encouraging and covering up or ignoring doping by Olympic athletes," according to an unsuccessful lawsuit he'd filed.

He then released documents showing "U.S. athletes tested positive for drugs more than 100 times between 1988 and 2000, but only a handful were barred from competing and 19 went on to win medals," according to a 2003 Sports Illustrated article.

Among those outted were: track-and-field champions Carl Lewis and Andre Phillips; sprinter Joe DeLoach; tennis pro Mary Joe Fernandez; soccer star Alexi Lalas; and wrestler Dave Shultz.

Also implicated was Tammy Thomas.

Exum "told me Tammy Thomas failed six tests with testosterone and should have been in the hospital, but USA Cycling didn't agree. They knew she was doping and kept letting her compete," said ex-professional cyclist Matt DeCanio, one of the nations's most outspoken doping critics.

Exum didn't return messages seeking comment.

Thomas recently acknowledged the failed tests and wonders why USA Cycling and the USOC allowed her to continue doping if it knew Exum had feared for her health.
She also wonders if USA Cycling and the USOC would have stopped her had she not challenged Witty's appointment to the team.

The USOC would not comment on the matter, but Pittenger and USA Cycling said the organizations never turned a blind eye to doping.

If they did, it stopped in August 2000. That's when the two organizations held a suspension hearing for Thomas based on four positive urine samples collected between July 1999 and April 2000, according to an American Arbitration Association document.

The association holds court for the nation's sporting disputes.

Thomas had been quietly fighting the test results that summer while publicly battling Witty's subsequent appointment to the Olympic team. She'd convinced an arbitrator to nullify the appointment and set a ride-off between the two women with the winner going to the games.

On Aug. 20, Thomas raced solo in the ride-off after Witty had failed to appear. Thomas won by default. But a urine sample collected immediately after that race again revealed elevated testosterone levels. Thomas had continued to dope despite the ongoing suspension proceedings and, in doing so, sealed her fate.

Five days later, Thomas agreed to drop her Olympic bid, and USA Cycling and the USOC agreed to give her only one violation despite the multiple positives. They also agreed to a one-year ban, the document shows.

Thomas could have gone clean or left the sport altogether, but she wouldn't give up. Instead, she marched into the biggest doping scandal in U.S. history.

Convinced she'd done nothing wrong and determined to regain ground, Thomas contacted underground doping guru Patrick Arnold.

The Illinois chemist and fitness buff had created and manufactured steroids undetectable by standard tests. The most popular were norbolethone and tetrahydrogestrinone, commonly called THG or "The Clear."

Most athletes seeking these drugs went through the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative - BALCO - which had a deal with Arnold. But the company worked only with famous people, and Thomas wasn't big enough to get on its client list. So she purchased from the chemist directly, one of just a handful of people to do so.

Arnold sent her norbolethone first, then The Clear.

"I told her, 'They'll give you the results that you're looking for,' and I explained to her pretty clearly what they were," Arnold said, meaning norbolethone was still a banned substance despite being undetectable.

Although they'd never met in person, Arnold and Thomas worked together from 2000 to 2002 via phone calls and emails. Every few months, he'd send her a fresh supply. But her repeated requests for refills and rumors of her physical appearance worried Arnold. He felt she was abusing the drug.

Also troublesome was news that doping authorities were catching on. Arnold told Thomas to stop taking norbolethone and start using The Clear.

She ignored him, a decision that ultimately cost them both.

Meanwhile, USA Cycling lifted its ban, and Thomas made a comeback. She won a silver medal at the 2001 Track Cycling World Championships in Belgium that September and courted sponsors to carry her into 2002.

Thomas insisted she was clean throughout it all. She professed her innocence in the 2000 letter published in The Clarion-Ledger and again during a Nov. 22, 2001, interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

But four months after that last interview, Thomas tested positive for norbolethone during a surprise visit from the newly created U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. The agent, Tom McVay, later told authorities Thomas appeared to be shaving her beard when he'd knocked on her door that day in March 2002.

A University of California-Los Angeles doctor, Don Catlin, analyzed the sample and identified the then-unknown substance as an anabolic steroid. His discovery led to Thomas's lifetime ban from cycling, and it triggered a federal investigation into the source of the norbolethone - a scandal now known as the BALCO Affair.

Thomas had challenged the positive results through the American Arbitration Association, claiming in part that birth control pills caused the presence of norbolethone in her urine. But it was to no avail.

At the same time, The IRS Criminal Investigation Division launched its investigation into BALCO and hauled Thomas in for questioning. Investigators needed her to establish a direct link between BALCO and Arnold and promised her leniency if she'd testify before a grand jury.

Thomas knows she should have told the truth but said she was scared. She didn't want to expose herself to any further damage and didn't want to implicate anybody else.

So she told the Northern District of California grand jury in November 2003 that she received only legal supplements from Arnold and denied ever taking anabolic steroids.

"I probably needed a time-out when some of those questions were being asked," Thomas said. "I had a court-appointed attorney and didn't have time to prepare. I don't really know what was going through my mind at the time."

Her evasiveness cost her.

In December 2006, a different grand jury indicted Thomas on six felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice related to her earlier testimony. She pleaded not guilty in January 2007 and went to trial in the spring of 2008. After two weeks, the jury found her guilty on four counts.

Her dreams of competitive cycling vanished, as did her newfound aspiration to become an attorney; Thomas had been studying law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, but most states won't admit felons to the bar.

"I already had one career taken away from me," Thomas reportedly yelled at the jurors after their verdict. "Look me in the eye. You can't do it."

She later was sentenced to five years' probation with six months' monitored home detention, plus 500 hours of community service.

Arnold said he feels bad about what happened to Thomas, that authorities treated her harshly and made an example of her. But he also blamed her in part for the ordeal.

"If she had done what I told her," he said, "she wouldn't have gotten caught and all of this could have been avoided."

Branded a felon and stripped of her cycling career, Thomas returned to Norman, Okla., to finish law school. She graduated with a juris doctorate in 2010 and immediately moved to Ridgeland, where she opened MS Fitness Pro and completed the remainder of her probation.

It ended on Dec. 14, 2012, nearly a year earlier than the original sentence, after a federal judge granted Thomas' request for a premature probation release.

Thomas had made the request in November because she thought it might help her obtain a law license. But she's far from reaching that goal. Thomas says she needs at least a year to study and prepare. But that's one year away from a job that already leaves her broke.

She wants USA Cycling and the U.S. Olympic Committee to take responsibility and provide her help but says they've done little so far. After her most recent bid for aid, Thomas says, the USOC agreed to pay for three half-hour sessions of telephone therapy.

"What's that going to do?" she askes.

USA Cycling said it refers accused dopers seeking rehabilitation to the USOC.

USOC spokesman Mark Jones said the organization is working with Thomas to provide available resources, just as it has done in the past. He would not elaborate, citing a policy against discussing personal cases.

Always the fighter, Thomas says she's not giving up, but she wonders how long she can endure. That's one reason she decided to go public with her story; she hopes it provides her strength while also helping others.

But she also fears the opposite: What if she can't handle the public exposure? What if it makes everything worse?

"This is the stuff that I have to wake up and look at and deal with on a daily basis," Thomas says. "And I don't know how to do it. There's no instruction manual for what I'm going through."

http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/20130224/SPORTS/130224004/Mississippian-s-mettle-tested-by-steroids-abuse-manipulation-own-choices

A university student known as ‘Mr Muscles’ has died after apparently taking ‘lethal’ bodybuilding pills to help him lose weight.

Fitness fanatic Sarmad Alladin, 18, who had posted snaps of his new muscles online, was taken to hospital just hours after praising the fat-burning tablets called DNP on Facebook.

Mr Alladin, an international student and son of an Indian millionaire, called an ambulance as he suddenly collapsed.

He was living in university accommodation in Epsom, Surrey, while attending the specialist art and design university in nearby Farnham.

A friend told The Sun: ‘He wasn’t the type to put something like that into his body, so clearly they’re misleading. I’ve cried so much since he died.’

Last week the University for the Creative Arts warned its students: ‘It has come to the University’s attention that some very dangerous weight-loss and body-building drugs could be circulating among students.

‘If you have bought or obtained Dinitrophenol or Dymetadrine tablets online or anywhere else, please stop using them immediately. The drugs are potentially lethal.’

Vice-chancellor Dr Simon Ofield-Kerr said: ‘As a university we are devastated by the untimely and tragic passing of one of our students, Sarmad Alladin. Our sympathies are with his family and friends at this difficult time.’

Last night Mr Alladin’s family, who flew to UK from Hyderabad, were awaiting the results of a post mortem.

A spokesman for Surrey Police said: ”Surrey Police received reports of the sudden death of an 18-year-old man at Epsom General Hospital on Wednesday, February 13.

‘The man, who is from Epsom, was brought into the hospital around 4am and was pronounced dead at 6.20am.

‘Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the incident. At this stage the death is being treated as unexplained but there is nothing to suggest any third party involvement.

‘Officers are liaising with Coroner's Office and a post mortem will be held in due course.’

DNP is sold mostly over the internet under a number of different names but contains 2, 4-Dinitrophenol.

It is marketed mainly to bodybuilders as a weight loss aid as it is thought to dramatically boost metabolism.

The Food Standards Agency has told consumers not to take pills containing any level of DNP after a second death was linked to the substance.

The manufactured drug is yellow and odourless and was previously used as a herbicide and fungicide. It was launched as a slimming aid in the U.S. in the 1930s but then banned in 1938, due to the severe side-effects.

According to a study published last year in the Journal of Medical Toxicity, in medical literature has attributed 62 deaths to DNP.

The study authors from the Whittington Hospital in London, wrote: ‘DNP is reported to cause rapid loss of weight, but unfortunately is associated with an unacceptably high rate of significant adverse effects.’

In 2008, Selena Walrond from Croydon, south London, died after taking DNP she had purchased online.

The yellow pills had sent her heart-rate racing and temperature soaring. She was found by her mother Anjennis trying to cool down the next day.

She was taken to hospital but died eight hours later from a heart attack.

Croydon Coroner’s Court heard that Selena had taken a gram of the drug the day before she died.

At the time her mother said: ‘I’ll never forget her yellow fingernails and skin  -  the drug was sweating out of her.

‘Selena’s life has been cruelly snatched away, all because she was desperate to lose weight. DNP is lethal. If you want to lose weight, do it the sensible way.’

A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2282158/Student-Sarmad-Alladin-18-known-Mr-Muscles-dies-taking-DNP-fat-burning-pills.html

For the last few weeks, GNC, the dietary supplements retailer, has run a special on its Web site for a workout booster called Jack3d. "Hot Buy, Hot Buy, Hot Buy," reads a red banner splashed across the product's page.

Federal health regulators issued a warning in April that the stimulant in Jack3d, a workout booster, frequently raises blood pressure and heart rate, and could lead to heart attacks.

Michael L. Sparling, who used Jack3d, died in 2011.

Pronounced Jacked, the powder contains a stimulant that marketers say increases strength, speed and endurance. At VitaminShoppe.com, where Jack3d is also sold, a reviewer boasts, "My muscles have gained mass like never before."

Yet, last April, federal health regulators issued a warning that the stimulant - called dimethylamylamine, or DMAA - frequently raises blood pressure and heart rate, and could lead to heart attacks. In December 2011, after the deaths of two soldiers who had used Jack3d, the Defense Department removed all products containing DMAA from stores on military bases, including more than 100 GNC shops.

Now the parents of Michael L. Sparling, one of the soldiers who died, have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against USPlabs, the developer and marketer of Jack3d, and GNC, the store where he bought it. The suit, filed on Wednesday in state court in San Diego, claims that the companies deceptively marketed Jack3d as safe and effective while not warning consumers about its potential health risks. It seeks unspecified punitive damages.

In an e-mail, Laura Brophy, a spokeswoman for GNC, which is set to announce its earnings Thursday morning, said the company did not comment on pending litigation. Representatives of USPlabs and the Vitamin Shoppe did not immediately respond to e-mail or return telephone calls seeking comment.

The Sparling case highlights gaps in product safety and regulatory oversight of the $30 billion dietary supplement industry in the United States, some supplement researchers say.

Under federal law, supplements are defined as natural products that contain only dietary ingredients. Yet the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly originally developed the stimulant now used in Jack3d and other workout boosters as an inhaled drug for nasal congestion in the 1940s.

With prevalent chains like GNC lending their reputations and reach to such products, the researchers fault the retailers as much as manufacturers for promoting what they see as questionable supplements.

"It's a pharmaceutical-grade product which is being directly introduced into the supplement marketplace with absolutely no regulatory oversight," said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who has studied dietary supplements.

In the medical literature, DMAA has often been described as a synthetic stimulant similar to amphetamines that can constrict blood vessels, raise blood pressure and heart rate, potentially increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. In 2005, supplement makers began to market the substance in workout and weight-loss products, often combining it with caffeine, which may enhance the stimulant's effects. Products like Jack3d and OxyElite Pro, which USPlabs also markets, became popular among fitness buffs as part of their pre-workout routine.

Although USPlabs now makes a new version of Jack3d - called Jack3d Micro - without DMAA, and the products are no longer sold on military bases, the original Jack3d remains widely available at some stores and Web sites. GNC.com said that Jack3d "produces an intense sensation of drive, focus, energy, motivation and awareness." Last week, a reporter bought the original version of Jack3d at a GNC outlet in Midtown Manhattan.

 But a study commissioned by the United States military after the two soldiers died raised red flags about the safety of DMAA products.

 "DMAA in combination with other ingredients may be associated with significant consequences," a team of military, sports and supplement researchers wrote in case reports about the deaths of the two soldiers that was published last December in Military Medicine, the journal of the Society of Federal Health Professionals. The researchers added, "DMAA continues to be available in dietary supplements despite the lack of evidence that it qualifies as a dietary ingredient."

The Food and Drug Administration also issued warning letters to 10 marketers of the workout boosters, but critics charge that the agency has been slow to take definitive action against the products. Health regulators in at least seven other countries, including Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, have effectively banned supplements containing DMAA.

Last month, a coroner in Britain cited the stimulant in the death of Claire Squires, 30, who took Jack3d before running the London Marathon last year, collapsed late in the race and died. DMAA "on the balance of probabilities, and in combination with extreme physical exertion, caused cardiac failure which resulted in her death," the coroner wrote in his report.

The F.D.A. warnings sent to companies last spring said that the agency had no evidence that DMAA qualified as a dietary ingredient or that it was safe. Health professionals asked why, nearly a year after the warnings, retailers continued to sell products containing the stimulant.

"The F.D.A.'s warning process may do little to nothing to stem the significant public health risk posed by this potentially dangerous ingredient," Philip J. Gregory, an associate professor at the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., wrote in a research letter last December in Archives of Internal Medicine.

The F.D.A. has received 60 reports of health problems in people who had ingested products containing DMAA, including reports of at least two deaths. Federal regulators cautioned that the reports did not prove the products themselves caused the health problems. Even so, they said they had safety concerns.

 "It was a drug. That certainly calls into question whether it even fits in the supplement space," Daniel Fabricant, the director of the F.D.A.'s division of dietary supplement programs, said in a telephone interview last week. "We continue to send warning letters."

Steve Mister, the chief executive of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group, said the agency had been too slow to issue a final decision about DMAA.

"It is incumbent upon the F.D.A. to make a decision as to whether it is a legitimate and safe dietary ingredient," he said.

The wrongful-death lawsuit filed Wednesday adds to the legal battles being waged by USPlabs. In December, the company paid $2 million to settle a false-advertising lawsuit filed against it in California state court by consumers who bought Jack3d and OxyElite Pro. As part of the settlement, USPlabs did not admit wrongdoing, but agreed to change the labeling to make warning statements on the products larger and easier to understand.

 The company has also gone on the legal offensive, using the courts in an attempt to defend Jack3d's reputation. Last October, USPlabs filed a defamation lawsuit against the owner of a supplements store in Reno, Nev., who gave a television interview about Jack3d as part of a consumer safety report on a local news broadcast. Philip Tracy, the owner of Max Muscle of Reno, described Jack3d as an "amphetaminelike compound" that "speeds up your heart rate" and could "possibly" cause death. A judge dismissed the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Dallas, for lack of jurisdiction.

 Reached via e-mail, Mr. Tracy declined to comment.

 The lawsuit filed by Mr. Sparling's parents said that on the morning of June 1, 2011, Mr. Sparling took the recommended dose of Jack3d after buying it at a GNC store at Fort Bliss in El Paso. During a moderate workout with his unit - a short run interspersed with lunges up a small hill - Mr. Sparling, 22, collapsed. He died at a hospital several hours later of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. Anne Andrews, a lawyer for Mr. Sparling's parents, said it was appalling that GNC continued to sell Jack3d.

 "Jack3d is a product with well-established dangers, and the F.D.A. and medical community have made that abundantly clear," Ms. Andrews said. "GNC has chosen financial gain over the safety of the consumer."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/business/death-after-use-of-jack3d-shows-gap-in-regulation.html?pagewanted=all

Retired athlete Glenn Kulka likely won’t live past 65 due to 10 years of steroid use

Steroids are more widespread, easier to access and one of the most popular drugs seized in Ottawa and at the U.S.-Canada border, CBC News has learned.

Won’t live past 65, doctor says

Former steroid user and athlete, Glenn Kulka, warns easier access to steroids will lead to more people living shorter lives.

Kulka, who played junior hockey, professional football, and competed in professional wrestling and mixed martial arts, started using steroids two decades ago while trying out for the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League.

At that time, even though he could bench-press 400 lbs., the team told him he had to gain about 15 lbs. more to fit their blueprint for the position he played.

“I said, ‘OK I’m in, how do I do that?’” he told the CBC’s Ryan Gibson.

Kulka went on to play 11 years in the CFL for multiple teams. He also joined the World Wrestling Federation (now known as World Wrestling Entertainment) after an invitation from former Canadian wrestler Bret Hart.

Glenn Kulka, 49, was told by a doctor his liver, kidneys and other internal organs suffered irreparable damage by a decade of steroid use. (CBC)

His body, which is still very muscular, took a beating during years of physical combat. Now the Ottawa man, who will turn 50 next year, has several regrets.

“I have to look at the damage I have done and that’s a tough pill, the hardest pill I’ve ever had to swallow,” he said, surrounded by several weights and workout machines inside his gym.

Ten years of steroid use took a toll on his internal organs, according to Kulka’s doctor, who also said he might not live past 65 years old. That means he could miss his children’s high school graduations and other important life events.

“I’m going to pay the piper at some point, and I mean the big man,” he said, pointing to the sky.

As Kulka can attest, professional athletes fuel the demand for performance-enhancing drugs.

Recreational use fuels industry

But together, recreational steroid users form the engine of the operation because many want a shortcut to lower their body fat and increase muscle mass, according to an Ottawa fitness trainer.

Drug dealers also roam around local gyms looking for prospective clients, claim Kulka and trainer Geoff Makhoul.

“There’s always a source … you talk to a person, who’s talked to a person, eventually you find your price and your point,” said Makhoul, who works at Greco Lean and Fit in downtown Ottawa.

Personal trainer Geoff Makhoul says steroid dealers prey on people who want a quick solution for weight loss and muscle gain. (CBC)

Makhoul said he hasn’t seen any dealers at his gym, but he has heard anecdotes of such dealers in Ottawa.

Bodybuilder Samuel Dixon argues police need to know more about the mental and physical damage steroids cause for users.

Police admit they don’t have the resources to target steroids, because so many other drugs cause immediate harm to society, according to the head of the Ottawa police drug unit.

The unit is learning more about how steroids are sold and stored, though. In a cocaine bust last week, officers came upon a room built just for steroid storage.

“There were shelves made specifically for all these little vials and the accoutrements that go with it,” said Staff Sgt. Mike Laviolette, who heads the unit. “It’s not anything we’ve ever seen.”

Laviolette also said steroid dealers exist in a “small, tight community,” which makes it more difficult to investigate.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2013/03/26/ottawa-steroids-access-increase-health-danger.html?cmp=rss

Over the weekend, news started to circulated among members of the bodybuilding community that another life had been prematurely cut short. Nasser El Sonbaty died last week; presumably of kidney failure that began as an aggressive and persistent kidney infection. Matt Duvall had died just a week earlier while Joe Weider’s death was verified yesterday. Joe Weider and Robert Kennedy were the 2 key figures most responsible for the commercialization of steroids, bodybuilding magazines, international bodybuilding shows, and the explosive muscle supplement industry.

On the day of his death, Nasser was only 47 years old; residing in America  though his middle-class upbringing has roots in Germany where he received his undergraduate degree in sociology/political science from Augsburg University. However, Germany’s broad acceptance of performance enhancing drugs provided a suitable environment for Nasser to pursue steroid use and ultimately a bodybuilding career in 1983. Merely 2 years later, he’d entered his first competition which resulted in a respectable 6th place ranking. In 1994, Nasser El Sonbaty made his first ever appearance at the Mr. Olympia contest (considered to be the pinnacle of bodybuilding contests) where he came in 7th place. Nasser’s fans often claimed that his poor rankings were unfair when contrasted against other competitors like countryman Dorian Yates and American Ronnie Coleman. Together, these bodybuilders were redefining the human physique to be more box-like with less emphasis on tapered lines and contour.

The passage of time made Nasser less competitive and his offseason weight was well above 300 pounds - reduced to average 280 pounds during competition. Nasser resigned himself from bodybuilding competitions and his earnings were primarily generated from product sponsorships, guest posing engagements, and other activities on web forums. In fact, the anonymity of bodybuilding forums was a preferred way for Nasser to vent his frustrations while offering tips for steroid use under the ‘GH15′ username.

We at www.steroidanalysis.com struggle to find variables of this case that would distinguish Nasser El Sonbaty’s death from other bodybuilders who’ve gone before him. The very fact that there was a list of irregular deaths in the 1980s, linked to steroid use, should have raised red flags that would have either curtailed or terminated his steroid use. Nasser’s college education provided every opportunity to learn about the perils of steroid/HGH use prior to his 1983 ambitions. The only appreciable difference is the fact that there is no stigma against steroid use in Germany as well as other European nations. In fact, large pharmaceutical companies including Searle are allowed to manufacture vast quantities of steroids knowing that (a) their output far exceeds demand associated by consumers who have legitimate medical needs and (b) their product is openly consumed or redistributed throughout the global steroid market.

Generous words of respect were offered by members of several bodybuilding message boards including Bodybuilding.com and Getbig.com. We at www.steroidanalysis.com found it humorous but profoundly irritating that members would attribute Nasser’s ultimate demise simply to body size and diet! Confrontations even emerged between web fans of the same forum about hypothetical causes of Nasser’s death. Nonetheless, most views carefully avoided the “S” word â€" STEROIDS, STERoids, Steroids, steroids. To both the ordinary gym rat and hulking ‘Juice Head’ (who is stacking 5 different PEDs), the notion of steroid use as being a potential cause of a bodybuilder’s death would be expected. It is completely illogical and statistically impossible for a body of web members to tip toe around this issue of steroids by only contemplating diet, body size, space aliens, or fairy dust!

We are becoming quite tired of these senseless and premature steroid deaths. Nasser’s death immediately followed the death of Matt Duval. Matt Duval was another bodybuilder with too much body weight relative to his vertically-challenged frame. Unlike Nasser, Matt didn’t achieve the same level of notoriety with competitions limited to amateur Junior National competitions and ad hoc guest posing appearances. We offer no kind words to describe either Matt Duval or Nasser El Sonbaty following such horrible deaths. In his absence, Nasser adversely affected the lives of family members, American & German friends, and a global fan base. The enormity of their structures was influential to young generations determined to initiate steroid cycles even though they would become too addicted to observe Nasser’s final outcome and deviate from their destructive behavior. For these reasons, we offer no ‘Rest In Peace’ sentiments. Rather, we say “It Is What It Is”.

Author:  Administrator  steroidanalysis.com

http://steroidanalysis.com/2013/03/nasser-dead-too/

Kris McKenzie’s family say the loving, lovable 20-year-old became a different person after he began using steroids.

Kris McKenzie loved his puppy, Oden. One day, inexplicably, Kris flew into a rage, grabbed Oden and threw him into a wall.

The brutal act was totally out of character for a 20-year-old described by his family as a “happy-go-lucky kid”. Kris’ rage scared his family, and made them deeply worried.

They had every reason to be. Months later Kris was dead. He took his own life, an act that was later attributed by a coroner to depression caused by withdrawal from an anabolic steroid he had been taking and had quit cold turkey.

Kris Anthony McKenzie’s death in Invercargill in 1999 was the first case of a suicide being linked to steroid use in New Zealand. The coroner’s office could not tell the Herald how many more, if any, there have been since. Such statistics aren’t readily available.

But the link between steroid usage and mental illnesses such as psychosis and depression has been well established. In 2000 a study of 62 Finnish weightlifters who were strongly suspected of taking steroids found the death rate of the group was more than four times above normal.

When former British rugby league hooker Terry Newton took his own life in 2010 he had traces of steroids, cocaine and amphetamines in his system. Toxicology reports showed he had taken the steroid nandrolone within a week of his death.

Newton had been serving a two-year ban after becoming the first athlete to test positive for human growth hormone, and had hoped to work with national officials warning players about the dangers of drugs.

Those dangers, as Kris McKenzie’s family can attest, don’t just apply to athletes. “We, like so many others, naively believed that anabolic steroid usage was only practised within the elite athletic world, not in our local gyms by our own healthy Kiwi kids,” says Kris’ mother, Shari.

His death completely blindsided the family. No one saw it coming.

“That pain of losing your child to suicide is indescribable,” says Shari.

“It was a shock. I’m not proud of saying I was quite smug that my children were really well adjusted and we were living a really happy home life. It was like ‘this kind of thing doesn’t happen to us’. Then suddenly this terrible, terrible thing was happening to us.

“The pain was unbearable. The grief of losing a child is so enormous that the pain is indescribable. I honestly didn’t know how I was going to survive it. I couldn’t imagine how to carry on with my life. I felt that I’d failed him as a mother. It was my job to keep him safe. I was feeling this terrible, terrible guilt at not being able to keep him safe.”

A good-looking kid, Kris was body conscious, and discovered body building at 17. Shari was warned by a friend to be careful when he switched gyms, but she didn’t realise what the warning was about. The family were completely unaware of the threat posed by steroids.

“We had no idea he was on steroids,” says older sister Johanna.

“But even if we had known he was on steroids we would never have connected that they could contribute to his aggression and all those mental side effects.”

The anger at what happened to Kris hasn’t faded. Before his death, Kris’ arms often displayed bruising consistent with needle marks. After his death a vial of the prescription-only steroid propionate salt of testosterone was found in his wardrobe.

A police investigation uncovered the likely identity of the suppliers, but no prosecution was ever brought.

“To me it was criminal activity, supplying illegal drugs to vulnerable young men,” says Shari. “They had no consideration of the consequences. They encouraged these men who were young and impressionable, at an age when body image was important to them. The easy option was the good option and they encouraged that. They were trainers, people who were working in the fitness industry, who were role models for our youth.”

Shari’s concern at the time was that penalties for steroid-related crimes were so light they were barely a deterrent. Not much has changed. A Herald investigation into performance-enhancing peptides published in April found that prosecutions for performance and image enhancing drugs (Pied) importation and distribution are rare, and usually result in a fine or community-based sentence.

Kris wasn’t the only Invercargill teenager taking steroids in 1999. “There were some big issues down there,” says Johanna. “Kris was just one of dozens of young guys getting mixed up in that scene.”

If that was the case in Invercargill, she says, then what is the extent of the problem in bigger centres? And how much more stark is the threat now that importing is at record levels, and the internet has opened up a host of new markets to would-be buyers?

Former Commonwealth swimming champion and outspoken campaigner against steroid abuse Dave Gerrard gave evidence at Kris McKenzie’s inquest. The raw emotion in the court when Kris’ friend testified about him kicking his beloved dog was palpable, recalls Gerrard.

“I’m constantly being asked questions like ‘why don’t you just flag it and let anybody take anything?’

“Well, bugger it. There is a lot to be lost. If you lose those fundamental principles then what sort of sport will my kids and grandkids play?”

Gerrard will always wonder what he might have achieved in his swimming career had he not come up against the drug-fuelled Eastern Europeans that dominated the 1960s. But bigger issues were at play than who won what-coloured medal.

“There were some horrific health implications,” he says. “We tend not to highlight the health, but think of the moral issues of cheating.”

Steroids robbed the McKenzies of much more than a shot at glory.

“It was like Kris became someone we didn’t know,” says Shari. “[Attacking Oden] was so foreign to his behaviour. He was happy, so loved by everybody, just a lovely, happy-go-lucky kid enjoying life. He was kind and generous, loved his friends, and really, really loved Oden.”

Never ending heartbreak over loss of brother

Johanna ChamberlainIt’s been 13 years since my younger brother Kris took his life. He had just turned 20. I am now 35, have married and have two beautiful children.

Kris’ photo hangs on my wall – his young face frozen in time. “Who’s that?” my 2-year-old asked the other day. “That’s your Uncle Kris,” I replied. “Where is Uncle Kris?” “He’s in heaven.” “Why? … I like Uncle Kris …”

My children would have loved their Uncle Kris and it breaks my heart they will never meet him.

They will never have cousins. I’ll never be an aunty.

Grief is lonely and never-ending. Often I find myself swallowing a lump in my throat or wiping away tears – forcing myself to hold my head up and get on with life. I still have my life to live.

Nonetheless, a surge of anger emerges when I hear of sportsmen and women taking steroids to enhance their performance, and I feel sick to my stomach when I see bodybuilders flexing their inflated muscles with pride on television and in magazines.

While professional sportspeople abusing steroids get condemned publicly, an underbelly of seedy steroid abuse is happening under our noses. People need to wake up. It isn’t just the Lance Armstrongs, Nadzeya Ostapchuks and rugby heroes taking these body and mind-altering drugs. Ordinary young New Zealand men and women are getting lured into a drug scene that seems to be thriving.

Kris was an impressionable 19-year-old when got sucked into the steroid scene in Invercargill. My family, unaware Kris was on steroids, watched him self-destruct from a hopeless distance.

He put up a wall and wouldn’t let us in. When Kris decided he didn’t like the person he had become and came off the steroids “cold turkey” the damaging psychological side-effects continued – ultimately leading him to take his life on December 17, 1999.

When Kris died, his “gym buddies” were nowhere to be seen. Conveniently, some we believed to be key players in the drug scene disappeared from Invercargill while police investigated allegations that steroids were prevalent within certain gyms.

While steroids and drug paraphernalia were found in Kris’ bedroom, the police investigation fizzled to nothing. Whoever supplied my little brother with those damaging drugs was never caught, and has been free to ruin the lives of other innocent people.

If steroid use can thrive in a little city at the bottom of the South Island, I shudder to think how widespread the scene is across the rest of New Zealand. The worst part: I feel helpless to stop it.

- Johanna Chamberlain

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10890944

Fred was in his mid-20s when a car accident on a busy Auckland road left him with serious injuries that would require months of rehabilitation.

In the months after the accident, his weight dropped from 82kg to 60kg.

Working out at his local gym in an attempt to get back in shape, he noticed how massive a lot of the people using the weights room seemed to be.

“There’s got to be an easier way,” he thought to himself.

There was. He spoke to a friend, who spoke to a friend, then forked out $350 for an anabolic steroid that was a blend of four types of testosterone. Getting hold of the syringes was even easier. He simply walked into a chemist and said he needed them to inject steroids.

After Googling how to inject the steroid into the muscle in his shoulder, he and a friend – who also paid $350 for an eight-week course – injected each other.

“We freaked out a couple of times,” *Fred told the Herald. “I injected my mate and he starting pissing out blood.”

The whole process was a little scary, but highly effective.

There were side-effects. Initially his sexual appetite and self-confidence went through the roof.

” … It’s really intense. You eat more. I gained 10 kilos. My mates were gym freaks who had been training for four or five years and what they were lifting, I was catching and passing them.”

There were also mood swings, swollen testicles and, once he cycled off the steroid, mild depression.

“I flipped my lid a couple of times, but I knew it was the roids. I knew when to back it off and just let it go.”

Drinking alcohol provoked even more aggression, so he tried to avoid it.

All up, he liked how he felt.

“I was a small guy and when I got bigger people noticed me. They’d say, ‘You are looking really good.’ You feel really good, and when you start to lose that it can be quite depressing.”

So he went back for more, this time taking a nandrolone-based steroid. It wasn’t as effective.

His steroid-taking days are now over, he says.

“I’m with a partner now. I suggested to her that I wouldn’t mind getting back into it and she said, ‘I’d rather you not.’

“But to be honest with you, it felt good. You are just at the top of your game. You’re really confident and when you are confident everything comes your way.”

* Not his real name

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10891205

Like any true Texan, sports has been a huge part of my life since my teenage years. Growing up I enjoyed experimenting with different sports and pushing my body to extreme physical limits. At the age of 17, I found an undying passion for track and field. I loved challenging myself, whether it be in the hurdles, high jump, or relays. Upon completion of high school, I received an athletic scholarship to the University of Arizona. By the end of my collegiate career I had claimed the NCAA High Jump title twice, runner-up three times, and was a five-time All-American. After a considerably good run in the NCAA I now compete as a professional High Jumper. My ultimate goal is to medal in the 2016 Olympic Games.

“My hard-work and dedication to athletics has taken me further than I would have ever imagined. By the grace of God I am now able to travel around the world and do one of the things I love the most. I believe the body is a temple and needs to be cared for and treated with the utmost respect. Eating clean and fueling your body with nutritious foods is the best ‘drug’ any person can give the body.”

Leta Hole was in her senior year at Choate Rosemary Hall, an elite, private college-prep school. A longtime hockey player, she’d been concerned about her weight, which at her death doctors estimated was 165 pounds. Her parents said they didn’t know she’d been buying over-the-counter weight-loss products from stores and later the Internet — until it was too late.

Leta’s mother, Bonnie Hole, vividly recalls the call she got from her daughter in September 2002. “She sounded distressed and she said, ‘Mom, I’ve done something stupid. Please help me. I don’t feel good. This was stupid. Can you come home?’”

Bonnie Hole called 911 and raced home. The teenager, who had a history of depression, told doctors she had taken about a dozen of the “diet pills” in a suicide attempt. She’d never done anything like that before, her parents said. At Yale-New Haven Hospital, doctors scrambled to figure out what was in the gel caps and how they could save her.

“They weren’t in a pill bottle with a label … they were in a Ziploc bag,” Bonnie Hole said. The bag had “60 DNP” written on it in black marker and contained 27 unmarked clear capsules containing a yellow powder, according to a medical journal article later published by Leta’s doctors. Prosecutors would later write that the DNP capsules sold by Cahill’s business “did not bear labeling containing adequate directions for use or adequate warnings against use.”

Leta’s body was being torn apart by the uncontrolled heat-generating chemical reaction produced by the DNP. “She was in such pain and screaming. They tied her down by her wrists and her ankles,” Bonnie Hole said. “It was all so chaotic and horrible.”

Leta died at the hospital 10 hours after taking the DNP. Her case, doctors later wrote, underscores “the profound risks associated with the use of DNP and other ‘supplements’ to promote weight loss.” There is no antidote to DNP.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/25/bodybuilding-supplement-designer-matt-cahill-usa-today-investigation/2568815/

Tampa – October 2013:  Trainer Ryan Bruggeman mixes training on the weight room floor with cardio high up in the air. He’s in great shape, but his path to fitness began much, much differently as a teenager.

Video can be found here:  http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/story/23632223/2013/10/07/steroids-can-leave-life-long-damage-for-teenagers

“I started taking some you know, black market steroids, just following whatever the biggest guy at the gym told me to do,” he says.

“I built and growing up from a fat kid who didn’t get any attention from girls to a guy who really spent his time developing his physique at one point. The attention was enough for me,” he remembers from his youth. “I felt like I was ‘the man.’ ”

“You may be ahead for a little while, but you’re not going to be ahead when it really counts for you,” said Dr. Pallavi Iyer, who is a pediatric endocrinologist at All Children’s Hospital. She was not Ryan’s doctor, but says teens taking performance enhancing drugs like testosterone put their health at risk.

“You go through your puberty early, you go through your growth early,” she says.

Steroids can potentially stunt your growth. Too much of the hormone signals the body to shut down and stop making it.

“The part that’s the most scary is a lot of time you don’t know, you don’t see these effects right away and it’s a lot of things that are hidden,” she says.

The effects can take years to manifest. For Ryan, it started with mood swings that eventually got worse.

“I was just all over the place you know one day I felt like I was a Greek God and the next day I felt like my world was falling apart,” he said.

According to the Taylor Hooten foundation, those extreme mood swings can sometimes lead to suicide, ending the lives of promising, young athletes.

“I think too many people take shortcuts without taking care of everything else, they want to take the magic pill and potion.”

Ryan says it’s tempting to look for that quick fix. He says his symptoms included those often associated with much older men.

“I don’t think I paid the price until later on, later in my twenties, my libido had dropped, my energy levels had changed…mental clarity was going,” he said.

That’s because Ryan’s body doesn’t make enough testosterone. He was concerned he couldn’t father a child. To correct the imbalance, his doctor prescribes injections, hormone replacement therapy.

The treatment is working. Ryan and his fiance Sylvia are expecting their first child.

Now, Ryan wants to warn others of the unintended lifelong consequences that come with using steroids. He believes the key to fitness comes with a healthy diet and a balanced work-out schedule.

“Good things come to those who wait, and you may fail a million times, but it’s not giving up that makes you a success in the long run,” he says.

Irreversible: Candice Armstrong’s steroid abuse has left her with male characteristics such as facial hair

The female bodybuilder whose drug habit left her with a penis and facial hair.

For many, Hollywood actors and bodybuilders among them, anabolic steroids have become a regular part of life.

But with side-effects that range from excess body hair to liver damage, using them can result in serious health issues as well as bigger muscles – as the stars of a new documentary fronted by former reality TV star Jodie Marsh prove.

Among the performance-enhancing drug users to feature on Jodie Marsh On…Steroids, is former barmaid Candice Armstrong, 28, from Walthamstow in London, whose steroid abuse has effectively turned her into a man.

Once a slender, pretty blonde, Candice is now a hulking brunette with muscles that wouldn’t look out of place on Arnold Schwarzenegger and body hair that sprouts from her back, chest and upper lip.

Candice had no intention of becoming so masculine when she began taking the drug, but says that it’s too late for her to stop.

‘No, it wasn’t my plan,’ she tells Marsh in a scene from the documentary. ‘You could argue that when I wanted big arms and broad shoulders, a bigger back and small hips, that that was a masculine look but I didn’t consciously decide I want to change from a woman into a man.’

The side effects have been severe. Along with excess body hair and acne, her clitoris has swelled so much, it has become a mini penis.

‘That has gone significantly bigger, yes,’ she reveals. ‘About an inch [long] and it’s shaped like a little penis. It looks like a little penis, you can roll back the foreskin…‘

Her breasts have also suffered and now hang lifeless from her hugely overdeveloped pectoral muscles.

Addiction: According to Candace, things would be worse if she stopped because she would lose her muscles

Surprisingly, Candice is sanguine. ‘They’ve gone empty and they’re not particularly nice but I’m cool with that – they were never my best feature anyway.‘

What’s more, she has no intention of putting an end to her steroid use. ‘I think it would do more harm than good,’ she explains.

‘I’d lose all the muscles but I wouldn’t lose all the masculine qualities like the facial hair and the deep voice… It doesn’t really go back.

‘If I was to try and reverse that, I’d need the same sort of procedures as a male becoming a woman.’

Despite her drastically altered appearance, Candice says the pros outweigh the cons and have allowed her to do something else she loves – a drag act.

‘It’s opened doors and enabled me to develop myself the way I want to,’ she says.

‘It’s given the opportunity to live out one of my dreams. I’ve started doing a bit of drag and I love it. I’ve always wanted to do a bit of drag!’

She adds: ‘If I get called a tranny and a faggot when I walk out on the street anyway, I think why not make something of it!’

Shocking though Candice’s appearance is, she’s by no means alone in her abuse of anabolic steroids.

Insults: Candace is the target of comments on the street because of her looks and has to wear men’s clothes

According to veteran personal trainer Happy Hill, who helped Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Philippe bulk up for roles, up to 20 percent of Tinsel-town’s leading men are using performance-enhancing drugs to get a buff body.

Another elite trainer, Mark Twight who trains Man of Steel star Henry Cavill, has spoken out against the use of steroids.

‘The guy who uses steroids and admits to it earns more respect from me than the guy who uses but insists he doesn’t and wants his fans to believe he did things the hard way,’ says Twight.

While lying to fans isn’t particularly edifying, worse are the dangerous effects steroid use can have on the star’s body.

One man who knows this all too well is former stuntman and bodybuilder, Ed ‘Spyk’ Gheur, who lives with his wife in East Sussex.

‘The thing with steroids is that it messes with your mind more than anything,’ says the softly-spoken muscleman.

‘It makes you feel invincible and you think the more you take, the bigger you’re going to be, the faster you’re going to be – and that’s what’s so dangerous about them.‘

But for Gheur, the consequences would prove to be more terrifying still. ‘One day, I felt like I had a pain stabbing through my heart and I shouted to my wife to call an ambulance,’ he remembers.

‘She found me on the kitchen floor. I was ice cold, had no pulse and I was clinically dead. She called the police and said my husband’s dead on the floor and they arrived with an ambulance like they always do.

‘The paramedics put an adrenaline needle through my heart to get it pumping long enough to get me to the operating theatre, and when I got there, they opened me up and my entire aorta [main artery] had exploded.‘

The reason for his terrifying collapse: steroid use. ‘I went into a coma for six weeks and I thought my life was over,’ he adds. ‘I had thought I was invincible.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2471523/Steroids-turned-man–The-female-bodybuilder-drug-habit-left-penis-facial-hair.html#ixzz2iTFUo000

Sam Chalmers

Banned rugby star in tears as he warns of steroid dangers

A RUGBY starlet banned for using steroids broke down in tears as he spoke at a seminar to warn other promising athletes not to make the same mistake.

Sam Chalmers, son of former Scotland and British Lions stand-off Craig, told of his embarrassment and shame over his two-year ban from the sport for doping offences when he appeared at yesterday’s launch of the Borders Athlete Support Programme’s Clean Sport initiative.

Flying in the face of adversity – Scotland’s Superman Obree defied the drug pushers and became an outcast in his sport as a result

It was the offer of cow hormones that put him off. Well, that and the cocaine. Not to mention the EPO and steroids.

You see, despite his reputation as being more than a little bit ‘out there’, Graeme Obree never steered anything other than the straightest of paths when it came to doping. Or, rather, not doping.

Laughing as he recalls the incredible package of performance enhancers thrust towards him in his ‘record-breaking’ one-day stint at French professional team Le Groupement back in 1995, the famously flamboyant Flying Scotsman – currently finalising a documentary on his successful shattering of yet another record – admits he did not always find it so easy to discuss a taboo subject.

‘It’s only 18 years later that I can talk honestly about this, without thinking I’m going to get sued,’ he admits, actually looking over his shoulder as he continues: ‘Because we all saw what  happened with Lance Armstrong and the whole road scene. I was told everybody was doing it. And, at that stage, people knew they would not get caught. There was no proper testing.

‘But I thought: “I’ll train harder than you. If you think doping will get one over on me, I’ll show you”. At that stage, I’m still thinking they’re using amphetamines, a stimulant to make them reach deeper into themselves. I was reaching into myself to that level anyway, because of my obsessive behaviour.

‘But they had gone way beyond that. And I was not willing to believe there could be a physical advantage from what they were doing.

‘What you are really talking about, though, is growth hormone. Bovine growth hormone. On top of that, there were stimulants like cocaine, blood-boosting agents like EPO and steroids.

‘It was explained to me that this was £8,000 worth of stuff but I would get it for £2,000 off my contract, for medical back-up. They were saying to me: “It’s a bargain, a no-brainer. What are you thinking turning this down, Graeme?”.

‘I wasn’t going to play along, so they decided I was a loose cannon and it was basically goodbye. I hold the world record for the shortest ever professional contract – 11 hours with Le Groupement on January 1, 1995.

‘I had agreed to join at the end of 1994, as a short-distance specialist to help the other riders get into the yellow jersey position. I was a speed merchant, so I would be great in the prologues, a 4k world champion doing 4k laps around the streets against the clock – any team would want that.

‘So I had the hour record, the world pursuit title as a track cyclist, then get attached to the road time and help the riders out. That was my remit, as well as trying to get the hour record back.

‘It was the start of a tough time. My brother had died, I lost the hour record, I wasn’t world champion because they banned my riding position, I had no sponsor, I couldn’t ride that bike any more – and I was fired from my French team because I wouldn’t take drugs.

‘This all happened in January 1995. I thought I would go downhill or turn around, get back uphill. That’s how I came up with the Superman position.’ 

 

Woah, woah. The Superman position? How did we get on to that? Spend any time with Obree and you quickly learn that conversation is not necessarily a lateral concept; he flits from subject to subject, only eventually returning to the original course.

The Superman position was a  revolutionary new riding style, with  his arms stretched way out front on handlebar extensions, forming a  massively powerful arch with his body. The second major innovation by Obree, who had already infuriated officialdom by rewriting all logic to create that famous hunched position, seemed obvious to a guy who does not see the world as others do.

After getting lapped by a competitor on his first outing, he stuck with it – and ended up regaining the world title for individual pursuit. Yet still the pro teams shied away, knowing Obree would not juice up – and probably suspecting he might just blow the whistle on the whole doped-up circus.

Sitting in a wee café in his home town of Kilmarnock, our conversation turns towards the aforementioned Mr Armstrong – now exposed as one of the biggest cheats in sport – and a certain day when the multiple Tour de France winner brought the streets of Paisley to a standstill.

Obree was there among the adoring fans as Armstrong took the accolades on a massed ride in 2009; the American was still the good guy, still revered, still capable of impressing even a former world beater. Looking back, does Obree not feel great anger and bitterness towards a man who has come to symbolise all that was wrong with road cycling?

‘I remember that – that was some day,’ he said. ‘I could have done what Lance did, you’re right. I could have had the bling or the honour – that was the choice. But I can see both sides.

‘I was winning bike races without it. I was lucky to come from a background where you go out to Hansel Village, get changed in a layby, ride up the dual carriageway, fastest against the clock and somebody hands you an envelope with 80 quid in it if you win. If you took an aspirin to try to go quicker, that would have been a scandal. That’s the background I came from.

‘But, if you were a road cyclist being groomed from the age of 15, going through the larger amateur clubs, it was very different. I could name five Scottish guys who were good enough to be professional riders – but they would not do the doping. I’m just the one who stands out. With those teams, there came a point where someone would just say: “Son, here’s the kit”. 

‘I was training to be a receptionist two weeks before breaking the world hour record. Getting changed in  laybys, picking up 30 quid for a race because I was a bit tight for money, that was my life.

‘When I broke the world hour record, people offered thousands, so I was saying: “I’ll be there!”. Suddenly, I was riding all over the Continent.

‘When the top pros met me, we would be chatting and then someone would ask: “What did you use for your world hour record?”. When I said “nothing”, they looked at me not with surprise – but disgust.
‘One Italian rider just waved his hand at me, snorted “Amateur!” and turned to walk away in disgust. He never spoke to me again. You see, I’m doing the wrong thing in their eyes. I’m not taking my job seriously, I’m just playing at it. That’s how ingrained it was.’

It’s a very magnanimous attitude from a man who, but for riders like Armstrong, could have enjoyed a comfortable and lucrative lifestyle riding on the Grand Tours. He might even have had an Olympic medal, one of the few honours to elude him, to show his sons.

Explaining his lack of fury towards the men who took the easier path to success, Obree says: ‘I’m resentful to road cycling. When I became a road champion under my steam and my money, in Colombia in 1995, there was not a single inquiry from a road team. I was the fastest man in the world over a short distance, but nothing.

‘Before the ’96 Olympics, a competitor apologised to me in advance because he was going to have to take drugs. He said everybody else was, so he had no choice. He was truly torn up by it, so he apologised because he knew I was clean. Everybody knew who was and who wasn’t. I was the one who stood out, even refusing vitamin injections because of a needle phobia.

‘If I told you how he went, you would work out who it was. But he’s someone who I respect as an athlete and an individual to this day.’

Obree gives off the impression of always trying to see the best in people and situations, constantly checking himself whenever there’s a suspicion of falling back into the depression that led him to suicide attempts during the darkest days.

Writing two books helped – a life story later turned into a movie and a hugely respected training manual. He’s also working on what he calls a survivor’s guide to depression, spending entire days – from six in the morning ’til ten at night – rattling out chapters in longhand.

Maybe he’s just filling the gap left by the conclusion of his latest project, breaking yet more records in a bike named – by Sir Chris Hoy, no less – The Beastie.

Lying down, head first, on a home-made chassis surrounded by a high-tech shell, he broke the top speed set by a bike, then the overall record for a prone human-propelled vehicle, reaching over 56 miles an hour.

‘The bike was at the cutting edge of concept,’ he explains. ‘I could have just copied everyone else. But I was never going to do that.

‘I took my design to somebody in the cutting edge of car design, his grasp on aerodynamics was incredible. There are so many preconceptions about aerodynamics that I had accepted – but are totally wrong.

‘You can’t realise how little you actually know until you face a bigger body of knowledge. But you don’t realise what you don’t know until the shadow lifts from the mountain in front of you. And the aerodynamicists did that for me.’

The entire record bid, from  conception and construction to  execution, has been captured on film by Glasgow movie makers Journey Pictures, with a view to releasing a feature-length documentary.
More than 200 hours of footage was shot and Obree says: ‘It was as if, every time I looked around, the camera was there. And the most stressful moments, when you would be thinking: “Just p*** off with that  camera!”, they were the moments they wanted. Part of me dreads  seeing the stress on film.

‘I’ve still not seen a snippet of  footage. I hate watching myself back. Not for any deep reason, just because I’m a middle-aged bald guy. Everyone thinks they are 10 years younger looking than they are.’

Don’t worry about a bit of male pattern hair loss or the odd wrinkle, Graeme. We happen to have some special cow hormones that’ll help you out with that …

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-2520174/Graeme-Obree-defied-drug-pushers-outcast-result–exclusive.html#ixzz2mzyoWcxf

Unnamed body builder wanted to look like Arnold

A bodybuilder aspiring to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique died after a workout due to his steroid and dietary stimulant use, a coroner says.

In findings released today, Coroner Carla na Nagara said a man, whose identity was suppressed, died of a cardiac arrest while training in the gym.

Na Nagara’s findings contained a warning against bodybuilding products and anabolic steroids, and the “significant risk of death” they posed.

On the day the man died, he was completing a 45 minute physical training session.

The session involved running and other physical exercises which were described by his friends as typical, and not particularly strenuous or demanding.

He felt dizzy and sick early on in the session, and said he had not eaten a lot that morning.

He was given the chance to stop, or to carry on, and he chose to continue.

But as he finished the workout, he was lagging behind his friends, and collapsed as they finished.

His friends went to his aid, while he struggled to breathe, making a choking or gasping sound.

They tried to resuscitate him, including with a defibrillator, but he could not be revived.

After almost an hour of trying to save him, he died just before 12.30pm.

The man’s heart was structurally normal, and investigations showed it was a cardiac arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat, that caused the cardiac arrest leading to his death.

Though there was no alcohol found in his blood or urine, or amphetamine stimulants, some unidentified pills were found in his room just after his death, Coroner na Nagara said.

The pills contained methandrostenolone, a synthetic anabolic steroid that promotes muscle growth.

Another type of pill was found, called tamoxifen citrate, a drug used in the treatment of breast cancer, but also used by people taking anabolic steroids to prevent testicular shrinkage and breast development.

None of his friends were aware of him taking anabolic steroids, though his good friend noted he wanted to be a bodybuilder and aimed for a physique like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The man also took several over the counter formulas such as “Rip Freak” and “Super Pump”, and took caffeine tablets.

Rip Freak is known to have an illegal substance called DMMA, or geranium oil, which acts like amphetamines. Usage of the product had led to increased blood pressure and heart rate, and had induced stroke in young people.

The man also drank four or five cans of the energy drink Red Bull each day.

Coroner na Nagara said this case highlighted the significant risk of death the use of anabolic steroids, dietary stimulants, and body building products can pose.

Though some of the substances are illegal in New Zealand, they can be purchased online.

Na Nagara said those who use them should establish exactly what their ingredients are.

This could be done by asking Drug Free Sport New Zealand through their website.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/9509008/Steroids-blamed-in-bodybuilders-death