Are Steroids Killing Bodybuilders?

Some time ago I published an article here on the ‘death wish‘ in bodybuilding. For those who haven’t read it, and shame on you, it focused on the most obvious problem with the sport I love – it is killing people. This isn’t mere hyperbole. Over the past three decades, a significant number of bodybuilding competitors and fitness influencers have died, in part, owing to steroid complications. I think, personally, this is one of the biggest issues in fitness writ large as ongoing research makes clear that more and more gym users are now taking steroids.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, I am not pulling a Nancy Reagan ‘just say no to drugs‘ line. I know plenty of people will talk to me about how you can do steroids safely and under a physicians’ care. Likewise, some might point at Mr. Olympia winners and point out few of them have died early owing to steroid use. The argument, and I think an important one, is that while this may be true (and again, not a scientist… just a historian), it is clear that many people are abusing anabolic steroids and their bodies are paying the price.

Steroids, Bodies and Bodybuilding

I once had a gym user say ‘my body my choice’ without a hint of irony about their political preferences on other factors. They were, however, absolutely right. If someone wants to take truckloads of anabolic steroids and bulk up to an obscene weight, like Rich Piana famously did, they are completely entitled. Likewise, if a recreational gym user wants to take steroids, it is none of my business. Nor should it ever be and if I ever turn into one of those people who shouts ‘natty or not’ at a fellow gym goer, you have full permission to crush me with a stack of plates.

No… what I care about are bodybuilding’s fitness and health standards. During the 1930s and 1940s, the most important bodybuilding shows in the world were the Mr. America contest and then the European Mr. Universe contest. I still maintain that despite all its problems, the Mr. America competition had the best philosophy for a bodybuilding show the sport has ever seen. The contest judged athletes in three categories. Their physique, which should be obvious enough for a bodybuilding show; their athleticism, and their personality. Thus three rounds existed: a posing round, an athletic round, and an interview with the judges.

Was it perfect? Absolutely not and research by Jason Shurley has highlighted just how often the personality round was responsible for non-white bodybuilders losing the overall title. This was perhaps most infamously seen was Sergio ‘The Myth’ Oliva accused the Mr. America judges of forgetting the American Civil War was over. In effect, several black and African-American bodybuilders scored highly on their bodies and their athleticism but were let down on their interviews with predominantly white judges in pre-desegregated America.

There is a funny throwaway scene in the Dan Harmon show Community where much-maligned character Britta says she can excuse racism, but not animal cruelty. I am not excusing the racism, implicit or otherwise, from the Mr. America show. What I do appreciate, however, is the ethos they brought to bodybuilding. For them, the body had to ‘show and go.’ In other words, you had to be able to answer the question. Nice muscles, what can you do with them?

The answer, in those early decades of bodybuilding, was quite a lot. For the athleticism round, athletes proved their prowess using the Olympic lifts or with reference to their success in various sports. This incidentally made athletes more well-rounded as they couldn’t specialise fully in bodybuilding. Combined with the rudimentary drugs of the 1950s and 1960s you’ll find the physiques were fuller and smoother i.e. not as lean, as today.

What Happened?

A ‘sliding doors’ moment was the creation of the Mr. Olympia contest in 1965. The product of Ben and Joe Weider, the Olympia was predicated on two key ideas: winners could continue to compete and judges focused only on the body. The Mr. America show famously didn’t let winners compete and, as discussed, included personality rounds. The Olympia thus had its unique selling points but one’s which unintentionally harmed the sport.

The Olympia came into being around the same time that anabolic steroids took hold in bodybuilding. Allowing contestants to re-enter after winning the show meant that athletes could continue pushing their muscularity and how lean they appeared on stage. Likewise just focusing on the physique meant that we could finally see athletes specializing on just their bodies. Taken abstractly, these are not bad things and nor should we condemn any sport for continuing to push boundaries. Heck the modern Olympics uses bigger, faster, stronger in its very ethos.

What changed is that both the judging standards and drugs available, began to change. During the 1980s Rich Gaspari appeared on stage with striated glutes. Bodybuilders had been lean on stage before then, notably Frank Zane, but Gaspari was so lean that you could now see his glute muscles. This became the norm. Ten years later, in the 1990s, the sport had reached the ‘mass monster’ stage wherein Olympia Champions like Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman pushed to absolute extremes their muscle size. The difference was, they were also incredibly lean.

Whereas women’s bodybuilding underwent a lot more policing in the 1980s and 1990s about what was an appropriate size and muscularity profile for athletes, men’s bodybuilding was largely allowed to run rampant. Sure there was an attempt to drug test shows in the early 1990s, but they were largely scrapped. When bodybuilders began dying in the early 1990s, the sport expressed concern but, ultimately, shrugged its shoulders. Going from the 2000s to the present day, the bodies have continued to push boundaries and, critically, so too have the drugs.

It is a simple problem for those competing in the Olympia. The sport rewards freaks. To be on stage you need to be chemically enhanced and if 100mg of one PED is good, 500mg is better. Some years ago the Washington Post did an expose on drug use within the sport which showed a litany of health scares and fatal cases owing to drug use. Unlike other gym-related sports like Crossfit, powerlifting or strongman/women, bodybuilding pairs excessive drug use with extremely lean bodyfats and efforts to manipulate electrolyte levels which can, in itself, be fatal.

If people are wondering why this matters, a point I always return to is that bodybuilding is typically taken as a litmus test for perfect male physiques (women’s fitness/health is a different article waiting to happen). John Fair and David Chapman’s wonderful book, Muscles in the Movies made the clear and strong argument that muscular movie and television stars have become more muscular in line with bodybuilding.

Think about it, whenever an actor brings to prep for a show, they use bodybuilding methods (training, drugs and diet). If you go onto social media right now, chances are you’ll see a lean and muscular physique in most men’s algorithms fairly quickly. I would argue that if bodybuilding practices are unsustainable, it bodes poorly for mainstream fitness. That several fitness influencers have died of steroid complications is sad, but strong, evidence.

Our Research

If you read this website, chances are you subscribe to Golden Era Bookworm on YouTube. Carlos, the account owner, is a like-minded spirit who is interested in the history of fitness. Carlos actually coined the idea of different eras in bodybuilding, ranging from the Bronze era (1900-1930), Silver era (1930-1960), and Golden era (1960-1990). Think of the Bronze and Silver Eras as ‘relatively’ drug free and the Golden Era as one in which drugs began to be used freely, combined with more specialised focus on the body.

Comparing 40 athletes from each area, we found that the mortality of Golden Era bodybuilders was lower than the Bronze or Silver Era. You can check out the data crunching, and the article itself, here, but the basic result is the important one. Golden era bodybuilders had a lower mortality than those in previous decades, completely reversing the trend of mortality rates across the twentieth-century more broadly.

So are steroids killing bodybuilders? Yeah… kind of. Obviously, other things are at play, like the specialization of physiques, but it is clear anabolics play a role.

Where to go from here? The first is to say that we deliberately stopped in 1990 before the ‘mass monster’ age so there is more work to be done and, in one preliminary piece of research on the 1990s to today, comparable results were found. Look, we all now drugs and death are plaguing bodybuilding, so we need to open conversations about harm reduction.

One of the best articles I’ve read on the ‘Enhanced Games’ which, if you are unaware, is a new proposal for a ‘drug Olympics’, is by Andrew Richardson. In it Richardson says that in the Enhanced Games are to go ahead, and athletes compete completely untested, we need to have some serious conversations about harm reduction, informed consent, and medical monitoring. Bodybuilding, as I actually argued in my response to Richardson, has long been an ‘enhanced game’. What we need to do is put our focus on athlete welfare.

We tried the ‘no drugs’ policy and it clearly did not work. Individual country’s steroid laws aside, athletes are clearly using and abusing aesthetic drugs. We need to be grown-ups and try to mitigate and protect users while also having a more painful conversation about body standards at the Olympia. The fact that the IFBB, the Olympia’s organising body, has spent the last decade promoting lighter-weight categories over the open category suggests that they know this too.

This article has been a lot more level-headed than my death wish one which was written from a place of grief and anger. The same basic point remains in both. We need to talk about steroids.