Tuesday 11, Nov 2008
A Retrospective of John Ziegler – The Doctor Who Brought Steroids to America
Posted Byi steroids
Those who have been exposed to the synthetic steroid world should have heard of the name Dr. John Ziegler. Ziegler was considered to be the one who introduced steroids to the athletes and vice-versa.
An insightful retrospective article from the Baltimore Sun paints the doctor as an enthusiastic-then-repentant genius behind the enhancement of the athletic world. Unlike what the majority of the public (or, at least, the bodybuilding public) has been led to believe, Ziegler was not so focused in providing chemical enhancement to athletes with the use of little pink pills called Dianabol. The doctor was also searching for any thing that would increase the abilities of every athlete and not just through the use of anabolic steroids. In fact, during his experiments with Dianabol he was also promoting to his athletes the potential of isometric training, hypnotism, and proper diet.
More from the Sun:
…the spread of steroids in America did not hatch as a grand conspiracy. It began with a few lifters who wanted to get better and an ambitious Maryland doctor who thought he could expand human potential.
“It all goes back to York and the experiments that Ziegler was doing,” said John Fair, a professor at Georgia College and State University who has written extensively on the rise of weight training and steroid use. “Other sports picked up on it, but his experiments were the beginning.”
“He was sort of this Dr. Frankenstein, creating a monster that would overwhelm sports,” Fair said.
But according to his correspondence and those who knew him, Ziegler was hardly fixated on the little pink pills as a miraculous key to human improvement. Instead, he was a relentlessly creative thinker, always on the lookout for the next method, device or substance that would make men into supermen.
“The steroids were an adjunct,” said Dick Smith, a former trainer for six Olympic teams, who was based at the York gym and who befriended Ziegler. “It’s not fair to Doc, because he got blasted as the guy who started steroids. Well, he didn’t start steroids.”
It was the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company Ciba which provided Ziegler samples of the steroid Dianabol in late 1950s. Athletes, particularly York lifters, during that time were doubtful of the drug’s abilities to promote strength and aggression, and only through Ziegler’s persistence that the steroid’s properties were recognized.
“What seems obvious is that no one from York was eagerly embracing steroids at first and that they gained experimental use only because of Ziegler’s insatiable curiosity,” Fair wrote in a 1993 article for the Journal of Sport History.
And even when it became obvious that Dianabol had the ability to improve the lifters’ strength, the Baltimore Sun report says, the ethical question did not arise immediately. The stigma came later in the late 1960s.
But before the stigma came, the use of steroids in sports had increased dramatically and the doctor, realizing the Pandora’s box he had opened, wished he could turn back time. He said in his interview with Strength and Health in 1967, steroids “are categorically condemned for the athlete.”
Two years before his death in 1985, he told lifting historian Terry Todd he regretted his involvement with the drugs. “I wish I had never heard the word steroid,” Ziegler told Todd.
Tags: anabolic steroids, Baltimore Sun, Ciba, dianabol, Dr. John Ziegler, steroid, steroids, York lifters
Posted in Steroids and Anabolic Steroids, Steroids in Olympics, Steroids in Sports, steroid nation | No Comments/Questions
The Tampa Tribune reports that a former Pasco County detention deputy received two years probation September 12 for steroid-related charges.
With the Beijing Summer Olympics less than a month away, Slovakian shot putter Mikulas Konopka was given a lifetime ban Saturday for an anabolic steroid use. It was his second offense.