For those who think that American champion bodybuilders were 'on something'....testosterone derivatives'....before 1954, this defies logic. Testosterone from animal gonads had been around in labs since the turn of the 20th century, but never used by outside of a few university trials.
John Ziegler was the godfather of steroids in America, and even he didn't know that the Soviets and German Olympic teams were using drugs until '54.
As an employee at Ciba, Ziegler had easy access to books and records from Germany where experiments with testosterone had been carried out by the Nazis, and which had been confiscated by the United States after the war.
In October 1954, Ziegler went to Vienna with the American weightlifting team. There he met a Russian physicist who, over "a few drinks", repeatedly asked "What are you giving your boys?" When Ziegler returned the question, the Russian said that his own athletes were being given testosterone. Returning to America, Ziegler tried weak doses of testosterone on himself, on the American trainer Bob Hoffman and on two lifters, Jim Park and Yaz Kuzahara. All gained more weight and strength than any training programme would produce but there were side-effects. Ziegler sought a drug without after-effects and hit on an anabolic steroid, methandrostenolone, (Dianabol, DBOL), made in the U.S. in 1958 by Ciba. Ziegler gave Dianabol to the entire U.S. Olympic weightlifting team in Rome in 1960, but they still lost to the Soviets. He gave up experimentation with athletes when he learned that some who had taken 20 times the recommended dose of Dianabol had developed a liver condition. He was quoted in Science saying "I lost interest in fooling with IQ's of that caliber. Now it's about as widespread among these idiots as marihuana." In later years Ziegler regretted introducing AAS to athletes. He recollected "but I wish to God now I’d never done it. I’d like to go back and take that whole chapter out of my life." [Source: Wikipedia]
So American bodybuilders/lifters had no access, nor even knowledge, of testosterone until then. Now some conspiracy theorists might claim that Reeves, Eder, etc. had some secret pipeline to some European lab or university source. But if so it is the best kept secret in the world, since nary a single person has ever come forward in the last fifty years to state otherwise. And most of these guys weren't of the mindset to go undercover and inject themselves with raw lab testosterone....they were more into eggs, milk and meat.
Is it so hard to believe that these early champion physiques of the 40's and 50's, guys who weighed mostly 175-215 lbs, who as great as they were looked like ballerinas compared to Sergio and Yates and Cutler and Coleman, were natural?
Check out Bill Seno below, all natural, who won the Most Muscular Mr. A. title in '64.
,niin sen jälkeen ne kasvaakin nopiaa vaikkei niin isoiksi kuin ennen aineilla.
