Who Sport What?

Sly's Rocky Road To HGH Bust

Sylvester Stallone has been charged with trying to bring pled guilty to bringing 48 vials of recombinant Human Growth Hormone into Australia. But he denies having had anything to do with the four vials of testosterone that appear to have been thrown from his hotel room balcony minutes before a visit from Australian Customs...

What, you thought he got his 60 year-old body into this kind of shape for "Rocky Balboa" just by eating his Wheaties for breakfast?

Photo: 20th Century Fox.

Following the bust, he joins Anna Nicole-Smith as an outed Hollywood HGH (ab)user. Schwarzenegger only admitted to steroids.

By all accounts, the HGH Sly was smuggling was Jintropin, the market leader in China. 48 vials of it indeed, with no import license and without even a valid prescription. It’s surprising, perhaps, that he didn’t have a scrip: in Los Angeles 60 dollars will quickly and easily get you a note for marijuana to help with a bad back or a prescription for Viagra to help with stage fright.

The sheer quantity of HGH Sly was apparently carrying is bound to turn some heads in the sports medicine world. 48 vials is enough to build a roomful of bodies. Was he taking it to Thailand to beef up the extras on the set of Rambo IV, now shooting? The most likely answer: Jintropin is available over the internets, direct from the manufacturer, in 50 vial kits. With the Beijing 2008 Olympics just around the corner, what on Earth is the Chinese government doing, allowing Jintropin HGH directly onto the grey and black markets?

The Australian authorities are to be commended for their vigilance: the bust brings back memories of Willy Voets and Alexander Vinokourov's wife (in cycling, being busted by customs with bags full of drugs is relatively commonplace). The media reports the maximum fine Stallone will face is only 22,000 Aussie dollars.

Seeing HGH being caught yet again at a port of entry is also a stark reminder of the difficulties sports medicine has had in devising an effective test. WADA and the IOC claimed to have a test prior to the Athens Olympics. But not a single analytical positive has come back. Are we really to believe movie stars are the only ones to have been using HGH to boost performance? After Feds here in the USA raided the home of Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley, finding HGH, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig downplayed the issue:

"I've asked that question [about the extent of HGH use] to a lot of [team] doctors and trainers," Selig said, during a question-and-answer session with members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. "The most I've gotten out of anybody is, 'If more than one or two people on our team is doing it, we'd be shocked.'"

Only one or two per team? Oh, so no real problem there, then.

Synthol: A Shortcut To Where?

Pictures of Gregg Valentino's arms have made it into The Times and subsequently my favourite website. Valentino has been linked with Synthol abuse, where bodybuilders take the shortest of shortcuts by injecting their muscles with oil to instantly increase volume. Valentino has credited other methods with aiding the development of what he claims to be the world's biggest arms. This is not real news. It's not even new news: Valentino was on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno four years ago and has been a media staple since. But it appears those guns still have shock value.

Of course, bodybuilders are no strangers to shortcuts. Here in California even our Governor has confessed to steroid abuse. For those notoriously hard-to-bulk spots, implants have been inserted for decades already.

It's worth noting that extreme body modification is one area where sport, art and societal trends have converged. Performance artists and porn stars have been at the public forefront, alongside "athletes", but weird stuff has been going on underground amid the simply curious for a long, long time.

Training for sport, meanwhile, has become an increasingly branded activity, simultaneously feeding and preying upon the body image disorders which are the source of much of this weirdness. The consequent challenge is to defend and enhance the simple enjoyment of physical activity and its context (think softball team, the great outdoors, etc.). Some companies get it. A tip of the hat is due to Reebok for capturing the zeitgeist with its sidewalk and new-media driven Run Easy campaign, reminding people that they're not meant to be killing themselves out there. It turns out no pain does not equal no gain. It just means no pain.