The Sports Doping Epidemic

In his profile of Brian Shaw, a bodybuilder dubbed the world's strongest man, Burkhard Bilger speaks with Tom O'Connor, a physician from Hartford whose specialty treatment is for muscle dysformia, a kind of reverse anorexia common among bodybuilders:

“It’s an absolute epidemic!” O’Connor told me, leaning in so close that I could see his pupils dilate and sweat bead on his forehead. “The men come to me broken and hurt. They come to me with cardiac problems and libido problems and erectile dysfunction.” His solution: low-dose hormone-replacement therapy. The sign above his booth read, “Got Testosterone?” It was tempting, to a flabby outsider like me, to dismiss all this as anomalous—an extreme subculture. But to athletes it was the new normal. “Are you kidding me?” O’Connor said. “Have you seen what’s happening around here? It’s never going to end.”