Benoit's death sheds no light on steroid use, By: Mark Spector
Underground Culture Conceals All The Answers
July 18, 2007
The toxicology tests on dead wrestler Chris Benoit provided a fitting scenario yesterday. Another dead user, and another steroid question without an answer.
As if we don't have plenty of those to ponder.
Dr. Kris Sperry, chief medical examiner for the State of Georgia, took the podium in Atlanta, faced the media that had gathered to learn whether steroids had played any role in the double-murder suicide of the Benoit family, and told them: "There is no way to know." Isn't that the problem?
Not enough users have stepped forward so that doctors can truly know what occurs inside one's brain when they begin taking steroids at age 16, as Benoit is alleged to have done. He apparently continued right up to his suicide at age 40. So there is no accepted, clinical evidence that the inordinate number of deaths of former pro wrestlers are following any medical pattern, and nothing to tellus what will happen to all those sprinters who have doped their way to Olympic finals over the past 20 years.
We don't know of the long-term effects of The Clear and The Cream, the two BALCO steroid applications that Barry Bonds swore to a U.S. grand jury he thought were flax seed oil and something else that was not performance enhancing. There is no sure way to predict what health problems await Mark McGwire -- if any -- if we don't even know for sure that McGwire actually injected steroids into his own body.
What of all the football players? Was former CFL lineman John (Juice) Mandarich the norm, or the exception to some rule that scientists have not yet explained? If some people can smoke a pack a day into their nineties, maybe some can handle steroids better than others, too?
Did cyclist Lance Armstrong use steroids to help overcome testicular cancer? Or did steroid use cause that cancer?
Did Armstrong use steroids at all? Or was he so super-human as to beat cancer and a pack full of steroid-using cyclists at the same time, a feat that seems impossible to believe.
Despite enormous circumstantial evidence, the answer to Armstrong and every other question is the same one Sperry gave yesterday: "We don't know."
Benoit, a champion WWE wrestler who was born in Montreal and raised in Edmonton, killed his wife and son last month before hanging himself, over the period of a weekend. Toxicology reports announced yesterday found no evidence of anabolic steroids in his system, though they did indicate highly elevated levels of testosterone.
"The only thing we can ascertain is that this level of testosterone indicates that he had been using testosterone at least in some reasonably short period of time before he died," Sperry said. "It could be an indication he was being treated for testicular insufficiency."
That prolonged steroid use causes impotence is something the medical community has ascertained, largely because it is one of the early symptoms. It happens while the user is still alive to tell a doctor what steroid and dosage he was taking.
However, steroids are an underground culture. So, even in death, science will not learn anything from Benoit unless the family was to donate his body to medical science for the express purpose of steroid research -- the stigma attached to such an admission makes that highly unlikely -- and if someone could give an accurate accounting of exactly what Benoit took over the years and in what doses.
None of that is likely to occur, which is one of the reasons why there isn't a hot-button issue in the world of sports today that is so clouded in ignorance as steroid use.
Google Benoit this morning and you'll find sycophants in the wrestling media who will point to the toxicology reports and exonerate the sport from any role in the deaths of the Benoits. In fairness, however, there were equally ignorant opinions coming out of mainstream media last month that centered on Benoit having been in a state of 'roid rage when he committed the murders, a knee-jerk opinion to three deaths that occurred over a 48-hour period or more.
The only thing we know for sure is that Benoit bought a lot of steroids. And it is likely safe to assume he consumed some, most or all of them.
Reporting on a U.S. attorney's office investigation into a steroids ring, CNN.com reported that Benoit had purchased shipments of anabolic steroids and human growth hormones from his personal doctor, Dr. Phil Astin, who prescribed, on average, a 10-month supply of anabolic steroids every three to four weeks from May 4, 2006, through May 9, 2007.
Did Benoit use all of those steroids? Or did he sell them?
Did the steroids do something to Benoit's mental state that turned him into an irrational killer? Or did he look in the mirror one day, see a 40-year-old man with no sex life ahead of him, perhaps facing a lifetime of liver and/or kidney problems and knowing that, without steroids, he would shrink back into that 165-pounder he never wanted to be?
Or is it possible he had tried to kick the steroids habit, and the resulting depression was so deep and dark that there was only one way to deal with it?
Those questions will never be answered, but one thing we do know for certain is this: just as many of the old Communist bloc athletes -- used as lab rats by government "sport" doctors -- have banded together in ill health to shed light on what happened back in the 1970s, the day will come when an inordinate amount of sprinters, baseball players, cyclists and football stars will begin to break down.
Some will tell their stories then, in hopes of saving a young athlete who might choose the same path.
