"It was John Ziegler, a doctor accompanying the American team to Vienna, who exposed just what this Soviet weapon was. Ziegler claimed that after a few drinks, a Russian doctor told him that the Soviet athletes were using—and abusing—testosterone. Ziegler was no stranger to testosterone. With his background in rehabilitation therapy and his connection with CIBA Pharmaceuticals, he was already experimenting with testosterone on himself, his patients and some novice athletes. In fact, author and historian John Fair writes that even the great John Grimek was cooperating with Ziegler and trying his drugs in the summer of 1954. Grimek reported disappointing results.
Both American and German research scientists had identified testosterone and noted its effects as far back as the mid 1930s. CIBA Pharmaceuticals was already targeting bodybuilders with ads for synthetic testosterone in 1947. With Ziegler’s help, CIBA manufactured the most popular anabolic steroid of the 20th century. The drug was Dianabol, which came out in1958.
The acceptance of steroid drugs among bodybuilders got off to a slow start. Drinking a gallon of milk or swallowing 2000 protein pills seemed more logical to them than taking a tiny pill to do the job. Even those who did take them were slow in accepting or acknowledging the fact that it was the steroids that were giving them such tremendous gains in muscle mass.
Out on the West Coast, bodybuilding great Bill Pearl was also curious as to what the Russians were doing, so he took it upon himself to do his own research. During a visit to the University of California at Davis in 1958, he learned from a veterinarian about the successful use of steroids in beefing up cattle. Bill figured that if it was good enough for a bull, then it was good enough for him. While continuing to train hard, he took 30 mg of the steroid drug Nilevar (three times the recommended dose for humans, but an absolute joke by today’s practices) for 12 weeks and brought his bodyweight up from 225 to 250 pounds.
Steroid use among athletes paralleled the challenge to conservative moral standards that characterized the era of the 1960s. It was a time that seemed ripe for the liberation of one’s desires. Individual freedoms took precedence over the rules, morals and ethics dictated by a long established culture—and by Mother Nature. If the new generation could take mind-altering drugs, it could take body-altering drugs as well. Anabolic ("building-up") steroids such as testosterone ushered in a new bodybuilding look that was larger and more muscularly pronounced than ever before.
During the early 1960s, the magazines emphasized caution about steroids. They acknowledged the rumors concerning Bill Pearl and others but tried to steer their readers away by stating that the drugs didn’t work, wouldn’t produce what bodybuilders expected, or were outright dangerous. Both Iron Man and Muscle Builder magazines warned of side effects and published articles claiming much better results with high-protein products. But behind the scenes, the athletes knew that they worked. Pearl openly acknowledged that he used them for a final time in 1961 to prepare for the 1961 National Amateur Bodybuilding Association (NABBA) Mr. Universe contest. He stated that the drugs by then were no longer underground but well known to the top bodybuilders."
