The Steroid Predicament

For taking the lead in efforts to establish drug testing in powerlifting for women, Jan has come under frequent attack, including attempts to have her removed as chairperson of the women's committee. One of powerlifting's problems is that it's a small sport, and most of the administrators in both men's and women's powerlifting are themselves competitors, which often puts those who must make decisions in a bind. People on both sides of the question have been intemperate, and people on both sides have, with cause, often felt wronged.

One of the proposed answers is to void any world records except those set in meets in which IPF-approved drug testing has been done. But who is to say how many men or women who have retired or suffered debilitating injuries would thereby lose a record they had set without the help of drugs? How can the organization justify taking a world record from those who did everything the IPF asked of them? No easy answers.

I have, however, heard world-record holders say they'd be willing to lose their records in support of a move toward testing. In a letter last winter to the IPF recommending that current world records be supplanted by lifts made in tested meets, Jan had this to say. "I will never again compete in the unlimited class, and so will never again have the chance to hold the squat or total record in that division if the IPF accepts our recommendation. I made great sacrifices in appearance when I increased my bodyweight to 105 kilos in order to lift those heavy weights, and I gained that weight because it was the only way I could remain competitive without taking steroids. I am certain that many powerlifters—both men and women—use anabolic steroids for the same reasons I gained weight. We love the sport and we want to be winners. Many powerlifters to whom I've spoken feel trapped. They feel as if they have to break the basic rules of fair play and good health in order to compete. It could be argued that by not testing sooner the IPF is partly to blame for the extremely high level of some of the world records in our sport. Had we begun testing earlier, perhaps many men and women would have been spared the health risks, the expense and the ethical dilemma of steroid use.

"In any event, if we are now going to deny lifters the uninterrupted use of the very substances many of them took to create world records, we should in all fairness remove those records so that both the lifters who used drugs and those who didn't have a fighting chance to make new records. In my case, losing my world records is not nearly as important as helping to make powerlifting a fairer sport in which the health of our lifters is protected and in which all the world records represent lifts made in competitions with IOC testing."

I admire her so. I only hope my admiration does not diminish the seriousness with which the questions I have tried to raise—questions that range far beyond the small, perfervid world of powerlifting—will be taken. For seriousness is needed, especially as we move further into an era in which increasing numbers of athletes in all sports feel compelled to use drugs whose short-term effects are potentially harmful and whose long-range effects are largely unknown; an era in which the Physicians' Desk Reference is the bible of many world-class athletes; an era in which rumors circulate of "urine transfusions," by which a drug test is beaten by an athlete using a powerful diuretic, emptying his bladder, passing a catheter into his bladder through the penis and then receiving a supply of "clean" urine from someone into whom the opposite end of the catheter is inserted; an era in which fathers with large dreams for their small sons may turn to the soon-to-be-cheap human growth hormone in an attempt to give their boys a leg up; an era in which more and more photographs of top women athletes in a variety of sports reveal the thickly muscled, vein-crossed bodies that, though they do occur naturally on occasion in response to the stress of training, are often the result of the use of male hormones.

The hunger for an edge is an ancient one, intertwined with our need to excel. This hunger led me to take drugs I wish now I hadn't taken. So it goes. Have they had effects on me that will result in a shorter life? I don't know. I do realize that having taken them myself puts me in the position, when I try to discourage someone else from using them, of the old man whose opposition to the sexual activities of the young varies in inverse proportion to his own capacity to indulge. But having been under the dread sway of drugs myself and having reflected on the things I've done and felt and seen, it has seemed appropriate to share some of what I have learned about life in the Faust lane.