Is Usain Bolt on Steroids?

Is Olympic Sprinter Usain Bolt on Steroids?

As we prepare to watch the 2012 Olympic Track and Field events, all eyes are squarely on Jamaican sprinter and world record holder Usain Bolt to see if he can match or surpass his blindingly fast times from the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. But does anyone care to investigate whether the world’s greatest sprinter — Usain Bolt is on steroids?

Usain Bolt’s Record Breaking History

In those 2008 Games, Bolt shocked the world by smashing the world record in the 100m and 200m races, becoming the first sprinter to ever crack the 9.7s barrier by running a 9.69s (including the early celebration that began 5m prior to the finish line) in the 100m and a 19.30s in the 200m. The following year at the 2009 World Championships, Bolt lowered his time in the 100m to a seemingly impossible 9.58s and in the 200m to a mind-numbing 19.19s.

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The Case in Favor of Usain Bolt’s Steroid Use

In the three years since smashing two of the most famous world records in 2009, we haven’t heard much from Usain Bolt. Rumors of injuries and relationships kept him largely out of the public eye until he re-appeared on the scene at the 2011 World Championships, where he ran a more modest 19.40s in the 200m before anchoring a world record-breaking 400m relay for the Jamaican Team.

Since 2009, Bolt hasn’t come close to touching any of his records and his performance at the 2012 Olympic Trials (in which he ran a mortal 9.86s in the 100m and 19.83s in the 200m) seemed to indicate that his best times are well behind him.

But that would ignore the entire process of steroid cycling.

As everyone who understands steroids knows, athletes utilize Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) pursuant to a cycle that seeks to slowly elevate testosterone and growth hormone levels (and corresponding to an increase in performance) to a peak that is concurrent with a competition.

How Usain Bolt and other Olympic Sprinters Can Beat Olympic Drug Testing

A typical PED cycle would begin 12 weeks out from competition with the target date being the day prior to or of the competition. Along with the use of undetectable steroids and daily growth hormone injections, the athlete would also have his blood drawn on a daily basis to monitor his testosterone and rhGH ratios in an effort to keep them within Olympic World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) testing limits. Close monitoring of these ratios allow an Olympic sprinter such as Bolt to both use PEDs up to the day of competition while still comfortably submitting to multiple drug tests.

This isn’t evidence particular to Usain Bolt, as it could just as easily describe the protocol that every Olympic sprinter is using to pass the drug tests. However, it is mentioned simply to point out how easily Olympic athletes are able to pass an Olympic-level drug test, even with the highest levels of scrutiny. The bottom line is that if an athlete is within the permissible testosterone and rhGH ratios, he is deemed clean. The reality is that any athlete who doesn’t maximize his testosterone and rhGH levels to the maximum permissible level has no chance of breaking a world record.

For example, let’s assume that a talented NCAA sprinter has a testosterone ratio (testosterone: epitestosterone) of 1:1 which is considered normal, or average. The current WADA guidelines permit a ratio of up to 4:1. Given the fact that the only way for an NCAA sprinter to make any money sprinting is to win international competitions and garner endorsements, what reason could that NCAA sprinter possibly have for NOT quadrupling his testosterone ratio up to the maximum of 4:1? Using a number of undetectable steroid compounds, that same athlete would presumably see a major improvement in his sprint times without ever ‘testing positive’.

And this is the folly of drug testing: It gives ‘dirty’ athletes all the ammunition they need to proclaim themselves ‘clean’ — replete with Olympic level testing results.

Passing an Olympic Drug Test Does Not Make Usain Bolt ‘Clean’

The worst argument that anyone can make for Usain Bolt being a clean athlete is that he has yet to fail a steroid or other drug test, despite being subjected to rigorous drug testing protocols.

The reality is that most Olympic athletes have their blood levels so closely monitored that only an egregious miscalculation in the timing of a steroid injection or use of a masking agent (i.e. diuretics) to dilute the levels of a steroid within the blood would result in a positive test. This is the only reason why we rarely see positive tests for Olympic level athletes.

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