Gym junkie

A trip to the local bodybuilders’ gym under the influence of muscle drugs

If you want to get ahead in sports, there’s nothing better than a nice big helping of performance-enhancing drugs. Just ask the guys on the Tour de France. At the end of last month the Spanish cyclist and three-times Tour winner Alberto Contador was banned from cycling after testing positive for the illegal anabolic agent Clenbuterol. He says that he accidentally ate it in a steak his mate brought him from Spain.

You have to agree it’s a great excuse. I have a feeling I wheeled out that line, or a very similar one, to my appalled mother after returning green-faced and soused in my own bile from a house party in the mid-1990s. But in the mid-1990s I was a teenage nobhead from rural Buckinghamshire, not an elite athlete with three Tour de France wins to my name.

Anyway, that was then. I did eat some Clenbuterol this week, but not on a plate of bistec. Rather, I necked it from a grubby old pill-bottle I found at the back of the medicine cabinet upstairs. I’d forgotten it was in the house.

It’s powerful stuff, the old Clen. It has plenty of interesting applications; most of them are no good to you unless you rear livestock. It is a good asthma medicine for horses, and in China they call it ‘lean meat powder’, because if you feed it to pigs they put on muscle very quickly without gaining much fat. However, humans do take it. Sometimes they do so inadvertently, as Contador is claiming. There have been mass poisonings in China in which punters eat Clen-tainted pigs’ guts and end up with violent stomach upsets.