According to the German television station ARD, Spanish doctor Marcos Maynar offered these services as for internal testing allowing athletes to monitor their doping to ensure that their use of performance enhancing drugs would not be detected by doping controls at the 2008 Tour de France and other pro cycling events. Maynar responded to the allegations that he aided and abetted doping by suggesting that ARD had ulterior motives stemming from bitterness over disgraced cyclist Jan Ullrich (”Marcos Maynar niega que quiera favorecer el dopaje,” July 21).
“Since Jan Ullrich’s tested positive, the Germans have wanted to shit on the Spaniards.”
Jim Lorimer, bodybuilding promoter and co-founder of the Arnold Sports Festival and the Arnold Classic, warned professional male bodybuilders competing in the bodybuilding competition in a private athlete’s meeting last Thursday night about reporters asking questions about “enhancement.” This was interpreted by those in attendance as a reference to anabolic steroids and other performance enhancement drugs although Lorimer never mentioned steroids directly. Lorimer offered guidance for bodybuilders who were approached by reporters:
Don’t focus on anything but the fantastic effort these athletes make which is… beyond athletes in every other sport as far as physical commitment and discipline and hard work and that’s the story I think we got to… Again, we got to make sure we tell that good part of the story; we got to tell the best of our story, ok?
Dr. Gary Gaffney from Steroid Nation posted an article on Huffington Post about the performance enhancing effects of human growth hormone. Gaffney responds to so-called experts who assert with certainty that growth hormone does not help performance in sports. As Lou Schuler stated in a recent post, the true effects of growth hormone on performance are not always empirically “knowable and measurable.”
Gaffney takes note of the lack of empirical research examining the performance enhancing effects of drugs that has historically resulted in mainstream medical organizations failing to recognize performance enhancing drugs. Given this along with results seen in “experiments of nature,” Gaffney feels it is reasonable to conclude that GH has performance enhancing effects:
New York Yankees baseball player Andy Pettitte allegedly obtainedhuman growth hormone from his father who obtained it from Kelly Blair who may have obtained it from pro bodybuilder Craig Titus. It has yet to be determined where Craig Titus obtained the growth hormone.
According to the Craig Titus and Kelly Ryan Investigation website:
The Daily News reports some of the drugs came from steroid-user Craig Titus, a champion bodybuilder who is facing a murder trial in Nevada for the slaying of his former live-in assistant.
The Daily News reports pictures of several professional athletes, including Pettitte were displayed on the wall of Blair’s gym. The newspaper said eight other major leaguers, several pro golfers and an NFL quarterback were also pictured.
Also, Blair was reportedly seen working with Koby Clemens, the son of seven- time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens, who was involved in a heated congressional hearing this past week. However, the Daily News reports that Koby Clemens, who is now playing baseball in the minors, hasn’t been linked to any illicit activity at the gym.
My first introduction to Dan Duchaine was through the photocopied pages of Underground Steroid Handbook that circulated among bodybuilding circles at the University of Texas. I was impressed by the matter of fact, straightforward discussion of anabolic steroid information for muscle-building and performance-enhancing purposes. There was a lot of accurate information contained within those pages, much moreso than contemporary journal articles and information provided by physicians. And for this, we generally overlooked the errors and mistakes made by Duchaine.
As one of the first writers to disseminate uncensored information on the use of anabolic steroids, we looked forward to everything Dan wrote from articles in Muscle Media 2000 to Dirty Dieting Newsletter to misc.fitness.weights usenet newsgroups. Read the rest of this entry »
One thing is for certain, investigative reporter Shaun Assael asks the right questions of the right people. This is obvious as the story of the steroid guru Dan Duchaine unfolds in the pages of Steroid Nation - Assael’s book on the recent history of the anabolic steroid subculture.
While it was nice to see that Assael recognizes Duchaine as one of the “founding fathers of the steroid movement,” it was difficult for me to read the story of Dan Duchaine portrayed in Steroid Nation. Shaun Assael recently published it as a book excerpt on the ESPN the Magazine website. But like I said, Assael interviewed the right people - Dan’s friends, Will Brink, John Romano, Bruce Kneller, Patrick Arnold, Stan Antosh, Shelley Hominuk and Nancee Shwartz.
While Shelley Harvey was in England, recovering from the brain damage caused by the motorcycle accident, the woman Dan Duchaine had selected to replace her, a woman whom he had promised prize-winning legs, was about to have one of them sawed off.
