They’ve been called a lot of things: the juice, the sauce, D-bol, roids, doping. The polite world likes to call them performance enhancing drugs. I weighed 178 lbs when I started playing rugby. I was 20 years old, and too slow and too short to play anywhere but in the front row.
Up there, I soon learned that I wanted to be as strong as possible. I wanted to dominate my opposition, or, at the least, not let the opposite happen.
I became enthralled with weight lifting – the heavier, the better. My goal was to bench press 350 lbs. In the weight-room (primitive in those days), I met some very strong lifters. That’s when I first heard about steroids.
Rumours abounded – that the new body-building phenom from Austria, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and most other big-name muscle-men used them. My friend and I drove to Mexico and bought some Dianabol; I took it for two weeks, and added 40 lbs to my bench press in 1 month, hitting the magic 350.
Public denials in all sports were the order of the day, and no one much cared what the truth was. Soon we started hearing about American gridiron players using, about the Eastern Bloc women, about the shotput and hammer throwers. It spread and grew.
Wherever fame, money, power, and/or narcissism influenced a sport and/or its players, steroids and their cousins lurked around the fringes and, in some cases, cut tracks right through the middle. American gridiron saw a lot of steroid use in the 1960s and 70s, and probably still does.
Steroid use was called The Edge. In a big money professional game, built on size, strength, and violent contact, having “an edge” on your competition was important if you wanted to earn the big dollars, if you wanted to keep your job. And your competition wasn’t just the other team on Saturday or Sunday, but also younger, faster, stronger players trying to take your spot on your team.
In those days it was a crude practice – changing room syringes, pills from Mexico or East Germany, cooperative doctors, closed-mouth team owners and managers.
Steroid use became a form of job protection, of economic survival in the ruthless crucible of cut-throat big business masquerading as sport.
Then people started dying – heart attacks, liver cancer, cerebral bleeds. That didn’t stop the use, but it brought it a lot of unwanted attention. Testing, then more testing, then a lot of political posturing, some enforcement, education, more policing, more enforcement, more findings, bans, more doping, and so on, and so forth.
Eastern athletes exposed, Ben Johnson stripped of gold, and sometimes it seemed that the floodgates of truth would open. But it hasn’t changed. Wherever money is on the table, whenever performance can be peddled for fame and influence and power and riches, there will always be someone looking for and exploiting The Edge.
Those of us who wake in the morning thinking about how things are going with our favourite rugby teams and rugby players, who pore over the sporting news for rugby bits, who remember individual touches of the ball, who still feel the grains of mud under our eyelids and the water squirting out our bootlace holes, who can hear the forehead hitting the sternum as we close our eyes for sleep, we are worried.
Relatively few incidents of drug use have been revealed in rugby. But no one who really pays attention to this scourge, this plague in professional sports, no one who can see how well steroids’ distortions-from-normal give short-term advantage to certain styles of rugby positional play, can doubt the high level of risk that our game is in to contamination from this array of poisons, and from the deceptions and dangers that go with them.
Personally, I firmly believe they are far more widespread than any testing regime in rugby has shown. I am suspicious that teams, even national test teams, have ignored, if not actually encouraged, their use.
There are individual players whose body size, muscle bulk, and emotionally-unbalanced aggression indicate something at work other than passion for the game and for fair but unbridled competitive play.
What evidence do I have that would hold up in a court? None. Why am I suspicious? I’ve been an athlete for 50 years. I’ve been attached to rugby for 45 of those years. I’ve watched, and taken some sincere interest, in all major international sports and many minor ones.
I spent many years in weight rooms and on training fields. I have more than a layman’s knowledge of diet, nutrition, cell physiology, exercise physiology, and human psychology. I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s normal, what the range or spectrum of normal includes, and what falls far outside that range. I’m a believer in the dictum: If it looks like duck, smells like a duck, quacks like a duck, and flies like a duck, it’s a duck.
You can’t tell a book by its cover, but that doesn’t mean all appearance is a lie. Carl Lewis was one of the most beautiful athletes of his type to ever grace the human eye. His skills were pristine, his efforts enthralling, his competitiveness and confidence supreme. He was a world-beater. But he was balanced – he was mentally sharp at all times, fully conversant, in control, and his physique matched his events and his accomplishments.
Ben Johnson was a physical freak as a sprinter; his biceps and deltoids and pectorals and traps were simply off the charts for a world-class sprinter. There have been heavy-muscled sprinters before – Jesse Owens, Bob Hayes, and a few others. But they generally had other sports for which those muscles were built and used: gridiron, in the case of Owens and Hayes. But Johnson had the cut and bulk and definition that indicates something strange, something wrong. So it was.
We’re starting to see some of these freakish physiques in rugby union. Remember what it takes to build out a 6’4” frame with 240lbs of muscle and virtually no fat.
Remember that, along with Superman muscularity, one of the attributes of anabolic steroid (and their cousins) use is selective fat metabolism, resulting in the cut-and-slash definition typical of body-builders, and now visible in the Web-based shirtless photos of some highly touted – and highly paid – rugby players. When you compare these photos with those of body-builders in the early steroid days, there’s not a lot of difference.
Another dangerous effect of these drugs is the altered psychology and emotions they create – sometimes savage aggression that can spill over into life off the pitch, and even against team-mates and family, and sometimes moody depression or distancing from normal interpersonal interaction.
What is the status of testing today? Is it rigorous? Is it “blind?” Is it truly random and unannounced? Is it horizontally and vertically uniform, i.e. across borders, and up and down the grades? Is it timely relative to the season and to impending contests?
Why have testing if it’s ineffectual and pointlessly applied? Why not just remove the chemical rules rather than immerse the sport in hypocrisy?
Is the sport just a gladiatorial spectacle for money and the masses, with behind-the-scenes obfuscation the standard of practice? Or is it a disciplined cultural tradition that teaches young citizens to be adults, to be good people, to be perseverance and strong, and to be faithful and reliable to their fellows?
Ben S
Roar Guru
'Of course it includes the bar, does that 20kg just dissappear when you lift it does it? Never understood why people don’t include the weight of the bar when lifiting weights. If it wasn’t a bar with weights, and it was a concrete block, it would weigh 70kg and you could lift it, just like the 70kg of bar and weights in the gym. They include the weight of the bar in all competitions, powerlifting and olympic weight lifting etc so why wouldn’t you include it at the gym?' Dnt know... I've just never included the bar. Funny you should say that. Maybe because at most average gyms people don't have an Olympic/proper weightlifting mentality, and so the idea of just listing the weights on the end has been distributed amongst the average punter?
IronAwe
Guest
Of course it includes the bar, does that 20kg just dissappear when you lift it does it? Never understood why people don't include the weight of the bar when lifiting weights. If it wasn't a bar with weights, and it was a concrete block, it would weigh 70kg and you could lift it, just like the 70kg of bar and weights in the gym. They include the weight of the bar in all competitions, powerlifting and olympic weight lifting etc so why wouldn't you include it at the gym?
Adrien2166
Guest
Haha ! Excellent! Well done mate
jeremy
Guest
I wonder what usage is like in football (soccer)?
Muzza
Guest
A WADA drug tester was at dinner the other night and I naturally raised this very question about drugs in rugby. Seems in Asia-Pacific atleast it is very low level stuff. It is far less prevalent 1) outside the US/Europe and 2) in team sports. If you are a sprinter you are probably high on the suspect list, or perhaps in a team sport with millions of dollars in revenues, same. They have both the need and the access to juice.
Rusty
Roar Guru
In a game with such competitive and physical nature I have no doubt there are plenty of rugby players who are or have using/used some form of performance enhancing substance. Its a chemical cold war out there with the chemists competing against WADA. New substances and tests are invented regularly. I suppose it also depends on the culture, I grew up in SA and I know more than a few guys who had their mammory glands removed due to being put on a diet of geelties and rooitjies when playing for the major rugby high schools. With this background I am not surprised we have a long lingering issue. I also think it is naive to say it doesnt happen here, perhaps not on such a large scale but there will be cases at the highest level where a player previously on the fringe is looking for the 'Edge'.
Rusty
Roar Guru
haha gold!!
Gary Russell-Sharam
Guest
Excellent Lex I have the same change in body shape and muscle structure. Mine is even more dramatic at 30 I weighed 58 kgs and was fit and quite well built for my size and now I tip the scales at 90kgs 35 years later and I have the same skeletel frame. My incredible change can be put down to a beer or three on numerous occassions mainly after rugby games which I still play (vintage) the extra padding and lack of mobility that I have acquired assists me in being tackled, I'm easier to hit. I don't wear red short and still play full contact and love it. I always wanted to be the Charles Atlas type but my genetics resigned me to having sand kicked in my face as a young man. All jokes aside I think I would have been suseptable to steriod use if I had come in contact with the product. So dearly did I want to be bigger when I was a young man, fortunately for me there was no one around to acquire these drugs from and I grew up past this vunerable time in my life and matured to the point that I became satisfied with my lot. I have copped a lot of ragging when young for have ducks desease and being a small bloke (I was 170cm) and for a time in my youth I suffered the small man's syndrome, always quick to fight etc. But eventually I settled down. So I do have some empathy for young blokes who would be sooo close to achieving to be tempted to go the next step.
Ben S
Roar Guru
'Ben I believe the average male can bench press 70kg. I dont know how accurate that stat is but a mate of mine who is a power lifter told me that, so take it as you will.' Does that include the bar? You think Mr Joe Average plodding down the High Street can lay on a bench and press two 35kg bells? I don't. I see countless young adults and men struggling at the gym.
lex
Guest
Substantial changes in body shape and musculature can be achieved without drugs. At 30 I weighed 68kgs and was very fit and mobile. 30 years on, I have bulked up to 90kg and lost muscle, with no drugs, no BTW and no dietary supplements except beer. But I do regret the loss of mobility.
stu
Guest
Lance is a creative writer - read his homepage below http://lance-mason.com/ With that in mind how much weight can you give to his observations and thoughts - is this factual or a wind up?
IronAwe
Guest
Ben I believe the average male can bench press 70kg. I dont know how accurate that stat is but a mate of mine who is a power lifter told me that, so take it as you will.
Train Without A Station
Guest
A little bit of hard work can go a long way. Especially upon initially taking on an intensive training regime. I started lifting when I was 21. I was 74kg with a size 34 waist. Within 6 months I had bulked up to 88kg with a decrease in waist simply with protein supplements, creatine and an intensive weights regime. Im now 25 and around 96kg. I use body building supplements and train regularly and have never used anything more than an over the counter body building supplement. If I, without the drive of a professional athlete, was able to achieve this outside of a professional athletic environment, than I imagine a professional athlete with access to superior support, training and nutritional advice as well as in most cases superior genetics, would be able to exceed this quite far.
Train Without A Station
Guest
Even Stirling Mortlock, probably the biggest back in Australia looks more like a muscular wiry than pumped up.
GavinH
Guest
When is the inquest into the two guys caught this year going to happen?I am intruiged to see if details of what happened will be released. I understand the press story is they took a "supplement" that is banned but will be legal from next year. Surely at the very least there has been a MONUMENTAL error by the team doctors in charge of such issues. The game has been professional for 15 years and teams spend millions on support staff. I assume that players have to check ALL supplements and ALL medicines with team doctors before using them. So it just seems extremely incompetent or suspicious that someone has not even checked the list of banned substances!??!!!??
Ben S
Roar Guru
That's my point, James - that is why pro players are so fit/muscular. If players want an edge then they'll look for one, I would guess, but there is nothing to suggest that steroid/substance abuse is a problem in rugby union. To suggest, as this article does, that appearances alone are enough to make the connection is simply ridiculous, as is the suggestion that testing techniques are pointless.
Ben S
Roar Guru
The average male in the street is a sack of crap. I seriously doubt that the average male could bench press 40kg. Check out the Australian obesity stats. The Clear? Marion Jones?
jameswm
Guest
And by the way - this was originally an article written by a gridiron player, for sure, and it has been adapted to rugby.
Gary Russell-Sharam
Guest
Gavin H, I have read the article and it makes interesting reading noting that there is no inference to steroids etc. LAS, I too agree where there is smoke there is fire, and as I have questioned in previous blogs, what is legal and what is illegal? There is a fine line between the two, one minute it's legal the next they are banning the same substance. I don't know about others but I have a jaundice view on the top elite players all being a pure as the driven snow, just because there is no obvious evidence doesn't mean to say it's not happening. Although the same could be said for the reverse, however going on human frailties I think the former statement to have more validity. I do know of first hand steroid use in club rugby many years ago but not being at the coal face now I only have to go on past experiences, I make the comment that human nature doesn't change all that much. ie smoking even though we are told that smoking kills, young people still take up the habit, the same with alcohol, there seems to be far more incidence of binge drinking now then when I was a young man even with heavy advertising that it is not the best thing to be doing. So why would we so naive to think that just because we might get caught we would not be using these substances. And as I have said in a past blog with the huge advances of medical science it surely is obvious that these advances would also include ways to camouflage the use of these products so that they can be used and not detected. If you are desperate to gain the edge and being pushed to achieve by coaches and selectors there is that temptation to use substances to achieve your goal. I understand how this temptation could be so tempting to a young man that is soo nearly there.
jameswm
Guest
The same technology is available to all pro players though, Ben. What if some of them want to outdo the others? What if they want an Edge? If you think none of the pro rugby players are having illegal help, then you're very naive. BHW and good diet worked for me - as an amateur.