Salon.com > Andrew Taber

'Roid rage

Thu, 18 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

In April 1989, nine months after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100-meter gold medal at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea, an elite U.S. track-and-field athlete named Diane Williams presented herself before a Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington. Johnson's steroid bust had created a media maelstrom, and it was now tearing the roof off a secret athletic society of drug users.

At her Senate hearing, Williams told what would become a ubiquitous tale of steroid abuse among female track athletes at both the amateur and Olympic levels. The influx of the male sex hormone testosterone in Williams' system had masculinized her features. At the peak of her drug abuse, Williams no longer menstruated. She sprouted facial hair and her clitoris grew to "embarrassing proportions."

Ghastly testimony followed from other athletes and coaches, insinuating that steroid use was rampant among athletes of all levels, male and female. After the hearings, a bill drafted by Sen. Joseph Biden Jr., D-Del., classified anabolic steroids as Schedule III substances. It placed them in the same legal league as amphetamines and made their use subject to radically stricter punishment. The chemicals responsible for some of the most Herculean feats in sports such as track and field, football, bodybuilding, wrestling and cycling were finally outlawed. President George Bush signed the bill, and history was made.

Using up too much too soon

Mon, 26 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Every year at Thanksgiving, John Nickles travels with his family to the Big Island of Hawaii. And every year, as the beaches fill with languid tourists and umbrellaed drinks, Nickles jumps in the ocean and swims. In 1996, he found himself more than half a mile off the island's coast. Arms wheeling, body undulating with the current, he suddenly looked up with consternation and started to dry-heave. Later, he shrugged it off. "I got seasick," he said.

When he recovered, Nickles churned through the last 2.5 miles of his 6.2-mile swim, emerging in first place with a new course record of two hours, 19 minutes, 57 seconds. He then ran up on the beach, climbed on to his bike and raced 90 miles. The next day he rode 174.1 miles, and the day after that he ran back-to-back marathons (52.4 miles).

Dying to ride

Wed, 21 Apr 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In May of last year, Mauro Gianetti showed up at the Tour of Romandie
bicycle race revving for a win. The Swiss cyclist never got the chance. He
collapsed during the race and was rushed to the hospital in a near-comatose
state. For two weeks Gianetti festered in intensive care, his body
fluttering on the verge of multiple-organ shutdown.

Gianetti allegedly injected himself with an experimental drug called PFC
(perfluorocarbon metabolites), a blood substitute reserved for trauma
victims who have lost massive quantities of blood. He wanted it because PFC
absorbs 20 percent more oxygen than organic blood, supercharging an athlete with an aerobic engine that can stave off fatigue -- and win races.

This is how sick the sport of cycling has become. Gianetti survived, and he
is racing professionally in 1999. His sport, however, may be on its deathbed. It is wracked with allegations of systematic drug use, and disenchanted
fans are now acutely aware that the superhuman efforts of the athletes are
often exactly that.

Running with the bulls

Mon, 20 Apr 1998 19:00:00 +0000

In the sweltering heat of a summer in southern France, sangria flows, the gypsy kings sing and bulls rule the streets. Every town sponsors its own annual "fjte," and big bulls are the guests of honor. In Nnmes and Arles they are paraded and taunted in Roman arenas, until either the bull or the toreador is put down. And in neighboring villages they jam around the streets in "controlled" situations as the young and often inebriated try to catch them by the horns.

My French host brother pulled me into this dubious sporting affair when I was lodged at his home during a semester-abroad program in Nnmes. Our group of globe-trotters, all from the University of California at Santa Cruz, was made up of people with names like Rain and Hope. Several held vigils for the victims of pbti, and we all played hacky-sack during our breaks from French class, our Tevas slapping at the little air-borne ball.

The program both ended and culminated with the Feria, a week of revelry that erupts in Nnmes in early June and draws hoards from Paris and the Spanish border. At night the bars spew onto the sidewalks to accommodate bands and raucous crowds, and during the day games involving bulls fill the streets.

Newsreal: france's dirty little artistic secret

Thu, 15 May 1997 19:00:00 +0000

jan vermeer's "The Astronomer" has an unsightly scar on its backside. If you were to pull the famed painting from its hook in the Louvre's Richelieu wing, you would see the spot where a black swastika once marked it as a prized possession of the Nazi regime. So were countless works by the likes of Picasso, Renoir and Rodin, all of them stolen by the Nazis from French museums and private art collectors during World War II.

Almost as unsightly was what happened to those paintings after the war -- this time at the hands of the French government. While "The Astronomer" found its way back to its original owner (it was legitimately donated to the Louvre in 1982), thousands of other paintings and treasured art possessions were kept away from war victims and their heirs by French museum authorities.

Hector Feliciano, a Paris-based Puerto-Rican journalist, ranks France right alongside Switzerland as a covert hoarder of Nazi war loot. He comes to that conclusion in "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works Of Art" (Basic Books), a seven-year investigation that has left a red-faced French government scrambling to explain just how so many stolen works of art have yet to be returned to their rightful owners 52 years after the end of the war.