Steroids

Ok, here’s a tell all from me – or the way I see it. I may get hung, drawn and quartered over what I’m about to say but I am sick and tired of hearing overblown media hype on this subject: Steroids and other performance enhancers.

The Olympic games have been and gone. The performance enhancers the athletes are taking are quickly overshadowing the ever-thinning veneer of respectability that the Games have. They are using either techniques to avoid detection or those performance enhancers that cannot be detected. Growth hormone for instance still can’t be traced. We are all asking when we see someone win, ‘Did they or didn’t they?’ I’d like to stop the witch-hunt for all the athletes and think that we should just accept that the use of performance enhancers is a natural step in the evolution of sports. Remove his or her illegality from the equation and everyone really is back on a level playing field. Literally.

How do you define a performance enhancer? How do you define ‘natural’? Should we take it back to the Olympics of the ancient Greeks? Even further? How about banning the use by athletes of cooked food? After all, name me one other creature on the planet that heats its food up before eating it? Hardly natural. What about drinking, not only from another animal’s teat, but to continue drinking milk in to adult life? No soya users, you don’t get off easy since all you are doing is substituting one for the other – like, say, sustanon for nandrolone.

So we accept then that the above argument is absurd. Isn’t that only because we have accepted their use because they – cooked foods and milk – have been around so long? Do we not appear to accept that if something has been around for long enough, that we’ve always done it, that it must be natural? This natural through longevity applies to other techniques used to enhance performance.

Look at all the research that goes in to physiology, physiotherapy and sports psychology. Look at the work done in biomechanics, for just one example, so that an athlete can analyse their movement when performing javelin throwing, golf or sprinting. All the movements can now be captured on computer and the athlete can adjust their training accordingly for the mistakes they are making. Computer? They didn’t have that back in Paris in 1896 for the first modern Olympics. The first computer came in 1943.

After the researches had finished making the athletes do their task better, it was time to look at the athletes themselves. Diet specifically. We all know now that what goes in affects your performance both on and off the field but this too is a relatively recent phenomenon. Thanks, in part, to Dr John Harvey Kellogg [yes, he of the corn flake] and others, they started the whole ball rolling on diet modification to affect not only health but also athletic performance.

As an aside, he was also a little bit left of centre and also advocated daily enemas. As Wiki says, “His favourite device was an enema machine that could rapidly instil several gallons of water in a series of enemas. Every water enema was followed by a pint of yogurt — half was eaten, the other half was administered by enema “thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed and may render most effective service." The yogurt served to replace the intestinal flora of the bowel, creating what Kellogg claimed was a squeaky-clean intestine. Now they never put that on the back of the pack! Delightful breakfast reading. Pass the sugar love…

Look also at all the sports supplements that are now on offer. Do you really think your body evolved over millions of years to digest your maximuscle protein shake before or after your workout? Is that natural? Creatine, discovered in 1835, is a naturally occurring substance in red meat but to shove five grams down your throat each morning would be the equivalent of 170 grams of beef jerky for breakfast. That’s dried red meat. How many steaks do you think you’d have to eat to get the equivalent? If you are the discernable eater and you’d like an alternative to beef jerky, try emu jerky! More on this here. If you want a great article on creatine in general, go here.

Supplementation goes well beyond just creatine alone. Looking in my own fridge I take, a multivitamin, another at night that is also a multimineral, vitamin C and glucosamine. We all know there are hundreds more out there to take.

To me then, with the addition of science to sport, it is an inevitability that other naturally occurring substances would also start to be taken. Testosterone anyone? We make it ourselves, men and women alike, so why not supplement with that? Growth hormone too. Sure the body’s production of it drops off after puberty but it never completely ceases.

Doctors reading this are probably blue in the face. Hey Doc, your next patient probably has high blood pressure due to drinking too much alcohol or smoking. Don’t tell me steroids are a fate worse than death, especially when the government not only knows this, doesn’t ban either but instead would rather garner the taxes from them and have hospitals full of people with liver problems, vascular problems, lung problems etc. That’s just hypocrisy or is it because as I said earlier, if something has been around for long enough, it’s just taken as natural? We’ll always drink. We’ll always smoke. Hey ho.

Yes, like any drug, alcohol and nicotine included, performance enhancers can, and are, abused. The number of guys dying in the sport I love, bodybuilding, never seems to decrease. Most athletes have got smarter though and know the continuous use of these performance enhancers will hinder, not help. Most now know that the liver needs rest and recovery, as does the heart. Alas, we can’t say the same for those who drink or smoke – though they all know it’s bad for them. I’m sure as a percentage, the number of users dying from steroids is a lot less than from alcohol and tobacco. [The same can be said for a lot of recreational drugs but that’s a whole other can of worms I’m not opening up here!]. I haven’t even got in to the libertarian argument of my body, my choice – government, butt out!

Also, the fact is less may die if steroids were decriminalised, as then proper education on their use would be more widespread. It’s like needle exchanges – no one wants them but we sure as hell need them!

It doesn’t stop there though. Having learned with how to do the sport better, how to eat for the sport better, and how to use the performance enhancers for the sport better, where else is there to go? What is the next step? Well, gene therapy could be one. How do you think they are going to test for that? DNA samples taken at birth and kept on record? Scary.

I’m Scott Sherwood, and I approve this message!