Steroids And Sports: What Price Glory?
When the young, green Chinese women’s swim team splashed to six gold medals and three silvers in the first eight events at the world championships in Rome in August, rivals howled. Steroids, they charged. How else could anybody get so good so fast?
The accusation was never confirmed: None of the Chinese tested positive for drugs in Rome, although four other Chinese swimmers had failed drug tests earlier this year.
Still, the outcry cast a shadow over the competition and clouded China’s victories at the Asian Games in October. The incident is just the latest in a string of steroid-abuse headlines that have rocked the sports world: Ben Johnson stripped of his 1988 Olympic gold medal, pro footballer Lyle Alzado’s revelations of steroid use before his death from cancer in 1991, and the trial last summer of World Wrestling Federation honcho Vincent McMahon. (McMahon was acquitted.)
Blind Eye
In the Age of Moneyball—the 1990s game of megacontracts and multimillion-dollar endorsements—sports seems to be sending the wrong message to young athletes striving for the deals that will set them up for life: It’s O.K. to pop or inject steroids to enhance your performance.
Why does sports seem to be casting such a blind eye to steroid abuse? In a word: results.
“An athlete who is lackadaisical, who eats badly, sleeps badly, misses many days at the gym, works out without too much effort, and takes steroids can blow away an athlete who works out to the limit of his ability, sleeps perfectly, has a perfect diet, and in every other respect goes to the limit of his body,” says Harrison Pope, associate doctor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Another reason for sports’ ambivalence is that steroids’ dangers have been debated since they were introduced to international athletics in the 1950s. While certain effects were anticipated and relatively common—acne, enlarged breasts, and high-pitched voice in men, deepening voice and proliferation of facial and body hair in women—the warnings of heart attacks and strokes, liver and kidney damage can seem extreme. “This doesn’t appear to be a killer drug,” says Dr. Charles E. Yesalis of Pennsylvania State University. “Don’t quote me as saying they’re good for you or harmless, but I can’t give you more than a handful of steroid deaths.”
The legal use of steroids has been shrinking, reduced mostly to helping men unable to produce testosterone because of pituitary gland problems, aging, or loss of testicular function. About 38,000 prescriptions were dispensed in 1993, according to Susan Koch of IMS International Inc., the pharmaceutical marketing research arm of Dun & Bradstreet Corp., with a total retail value of $1.7 million.
Light Sentencest
he U.S. illegal market stands at about $500 million a year, estimated an international conference on steroids in Prague last December. The supply is mostly smuggled in from Europe and Mexico, and to a lesser extent from South America and Asia.
Federal officials spend thousands of hours each year prosecuting steroid cases, with little effect. Even victories yield light sentences. A German national convicted in 1992 of smuggling enough methandrostenolene to produce 2.5 million steroid tablets, got a year and a day, plus a $5,000 fine. “The public just doesn’t perceive the dangers of steroids,” says Sean F. O’Shea, the U.S. prosecutor in the McMahon case.
And there is more than physical cause for concern. “A significant minority of steroid users experience substantial psychiatric changes when they take the drugs,” according to Harvard’s Pope. “Maybe 1 person in 20 will be very susceptible to these side effects and will have an absolute Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when taking steroids. In rare cases, people on steroids have become homicidal, committed murders.” Pope warns that there is no predicting who will experience this “’roid rage.”
Most scary, the dangers of steroids are not limited to elite athletes willing to take the risk to become a star. They are shared by thousands of regular folks eager to improve their appearance.
A three-year National Institute on Drug Abuse study just wrapping up interviewed 300 steroid users. “We’re finding firemen, students, lawyers, teachers—people from all economic classes—most of them taking the drugs for cosmetic reasons,” says chief investigator Paul Goldstein of the University of Illinois School of Public Health. Pope puts the amount spent by average users of steroids at $90 to $1,600 a year.
Teen Troubles
A large percentage of these new disciples of steroids are high school and college students. A 1988 study by Yesalis revealed that 6.64% of the general adolescent male population—perhaps as many as 500,000 kids—were current or previous users. A shocking 38.3% of those began at 15 or younger. And steroids can be particularly cruel to teenagers, causing premature epiphysial closure, or a halting in the growth of long bones such as the femur or the humerus.
It’s an epidemic, and nobody knows how bad it really is because steroids remain sports’ dirty little secret. Dr. Lyle Micheli, director of the division of sports medicine at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, tells of a roundtable discussion in 1992 where a local coach proudly proclaimed that none of his players took steroids. “One of his kids was there. He stood up and said 17 of the top 22 were on steroids,” says Micheli.
While many of the agencies governing sports have banned the use of steroids, testing is spotty and detection avoidable with a little extra effort. In the pros, only the National Football League has an active program of random drug tests.
“Sports likes the benefits of steroids,” says Yesalis. “It gives world records, bigger-than-life humans with tremendous physical capacities that sell television minutes and fill stadiums.” And if those athletes crumble, there are plenty more kids where they came from.
Steroids: A Resume
What They Are Anabolic-androgenic steroids are synthetic forms of testosterone, a male hormone that occurs naturally in the body. They can be taken either orally or by intramuscular injection.
Effects Increase lean body mass; increase strength; increase muscle definition; decrease recovery time, permitting more frequent workouts; increase aggressiveness; increase acceleration.
Dangers Potential reduction of HDL-cholesterol and elevation of LDL-cholesterol blood levels; testicular shrinkage; reduced testosterone production; benign and malignant liver tumors; bizarre, possibly violent, personality changes; feminization of the male and masculinization of the female; alterations in tendons; dependency syndrome.