Steroids Near You, Olympic-Sized Debt, and A Trainer Without Tricks
Sport Iconoclast
Smacking fantasy of athletics
Regular folks want 'roids too!
Chicago leaders pant for Olympics, public debt be damned
Marinello rips high-rent 'trainers' as frauds
By Matt Chaney
April 18, 2009
Typically, the presumed users of muscle dope are football players, baseball players, sprinters, pro wrestlers and bodybuilders, hunk actors--or the famous faces of headline exposure for anabolic steroids and human growth hormone.
That view is marginal, of course, distorted by media coverage. The popular press largely feeds us celebrity doping, the pop icons caught for juicing and magnified in scandal spotlight.
In everyday reality, more regular folks seek 'roids and pricey HGH than millionaire jocks. The most common users are often people near you.
Research and analysis, including sales data on Big Pharma, document insatiable world appetite for synthetic substances to enhance physique. People of all types and nationalities value a buff body, children to seniors, and many take the step of juicing for muscle, undeterred by potential risks.
"Doping among non-professional athletes continues to be underestimated and more widespread than is commonly accepted," said German professor of sport medicine Dr. Wilfried Kindermann, University of Saarland.
New York attorney Rick Collins helped direct a steroid survey that found "the typical male user is about 30 years old, well-educated, and earning an above-average income in a white-collar occupation." Collins, specializing in law on muscle drugs, said, "These findings question commonly held views of typical [steroid] users and their underlying motivations. ...
"The vast majority of [steroid] users are not athletes and hence are not likely to view themselves as cheaters."
Doper stereotypes also deflated in a groundbreaking, unheralded investigation of The San Francisco Chronicle, which concluded a variety of individuals patronized a former "wellness clinic" that sold steroids and HGH online from Florida. The Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center was closed by police raids two years ago, leading to arrests and criminal convictions, and The Chronicle performed computer analysis of 66,000 records seized, with special focus on about 2,200 customers who wrote of their motives for juicing.
Obesity and sexual dysfunction were the focus clientèle's primary reasons for seeking steroids and HGH; amateur athletics ranked a distant third, followed by body aging. Overwhelmingly, customers of the Internet drug operation were "ordinary people with an array of medical, physical and emotional complaints," Lance Williams reported for The Chronicle.
The journalists' breakdown of all records revealed sales staff sold or communicated about prescription muscle drugs to clients in 50 U.S. states and dozens more countries, including housewives, school kids, retirees, construction workers, pastors, elementary teachers, prep coaches, college professors, soldiers, cops, firefighters and government officials.
Among provocative findings by the newspaper, Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center received e-mail queries from 400 people at colleges and universities, with the majority apparently students, representing campuses like Yale, Harvard and UC-Berkeley. More than 80 government employees inquired from agencies such as the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Homeland Security, NASA and Veterans Affairs. Two U.N. officials made contact from abroad.
People found the PBRC through Web surfing, magazine advertising, and word on the street. Sales were $38 million over six years, Williams reported, with "only a handful" of pro athletes, none a superstar, named on client rolls of the shuttered business.
The vast majority of customers represented Everyman, thousands of common folks seeking 'roids and HGH, driven by "faith that their problems would be solved if only they could obtain drugs that their own physicians wouldn't prescribe to them," Williams summarized.
....
Chicago leads cities vying to drop silly money on Olympics
Looks like once again American taxpayers local and federal will feed the world-class money pit of sport, a cost-bloated Olympic Games, and this time for Chicago, Illinois. Yep, the city and state racked by chasm deficits and political scandal, often unable to pay employees and vendors, need us to underwrite their bid for hosting Olympic Games 2016.
The Olympics' sprawling layout for a region involves myriad costs and politics, hazy in public detail, a scam that dwarfs the common ripoff for a U.S. city that funds a stadium or arena. Instead of losing millions for taxpayers, Olympic red ink bleeds billions of dollars.
Fiscal disasters include the Athens Games 2004, with enormous cost-overruns for a city and country torn today by class strife, and Beijing 2008, where the ludicrous tab was $43 billion as area peasants steered ox carts along dirt roads. Now Beijing's atrocious "Bird's Nest" stadium, too large for normal events, is being refit for a shopping mall at cost equaling its construction completion of last year.
Olympic-sized folly plagues future hosts, fostering unrest in alarmed citizenry.
Winter Games 2010 at Vancouver is a funding burden on all Canadians, with unforeseen billions in expenses and lack of disclosure by officials, say critics like author Chris Shaw, professor at University of British Columbia. "The costs have gone through the stratosphere. It's $7 billion so far--that we know about," Shaw told Tom Tresser, in an interview published online by The Huffington Post. "We have taken on massive debt that will probably take 30 years to pay off."
London and the UK likewise reel over spiraling costs for Summer Games 2012, expenses topping $17 billion, triple the original estimate and sure to go higher.
"The Winter Games tend to come in at $10 billion and the Summer Games should cost a total of $20 billion," Shaw said. "I've heard laughable estimates of security for the Chicago bid at $45 million. Total security for the Vancouver games are at $1 billion, with the city's share at least $100 million."
At Chicago, laughable estimates, rationale and opinion flow from the city's elite fleet, cheap talk from politicians and celebrities, in their united quest to land Olympics 2016. Local media, for their part, are generally cool to the idea while staunch opposition rears in groups like No Games Chicago, which counts Tresser among members.
In typical scenario for any locality, power brokers endorse an Olympics for the switching of public resources to private hands through faulty subsidy and more shady allowances, Shaw alleges, and he sees the sting going down in Chicago.
America could also count on the International Olympic Committee and cronies, such as the USOC, to snatch any "proceeds" for a Chicago Games, after taxpayers would carry most construction and operations.
"This is part of a larger privatization movement and a local version of a larger global trend--that is, the taking away of the commons and making the public pay for what was theirs," said Shaw, author of Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games. "This is about putting the local community on the hook for private gain."
Chicago stands as clear favorite for the 2016 Games despite a comical bid package, impossible in objectives, assertions. Chicago leaders predict profit for all people after total costs around $4.5 billion, at virtually no risk to the public, an outlook more absurd than stupid-low estimations by rival cities Tokyo, Madrid and Rio.
Whatever. The IOC covets American sites for staging Games, always ready to savor our markets, corporate sponsors, mega-media and domestic security. But as Olympic organizers need America, we can always do without them. Anywhere's modern citizen is better off watching Olympic Games on TV, via satellite from someone else's country, on someone else's dime.
Last week, a rather underwhelmed Chicago populace watched civic leaders roll out the red carpet for visiting Olympic officials, who returned love. The IOC delegation enjoyed warm greetings by Chicago luminaries President Barack Obama and Michael Jordan, who both made pitches by video, and Oprah Winfrey, billionaire TV queen who appeared in person at an Olympics booster party.
Winfrey couldn't feel concerns of protesters in the street. A Chicago Olympics is "going to be big, it's huge, it's enormous," Winfrey said, speaking to media and spying a few dozen opposition folks outside the IOC gala, as they watched her go inside on that red carpet. "I don't understand what they're complaining about," Winfrey said, proclaiming an Olympics spectacle would be "good for everyone."
As Oprah expounded, Chicago city faced a deficit of about $200 million while the Illinois budget shortfall was about $11 billion, among terrible news on capital losses. Thousands of Illinois jobs were gone. And Rod Blagojevich, impeached gubernatorial clown, faced federal charges for corruption, bidding himself to be the second consecutive Illinois governor in prison following George Ryan.
Old Town resident Rhoda Whitehorse knew reality, as a protester representing No Games Chicago. "The city is broke, the state is broke," Whitehorse said. "Chicago has a deep history of cost overruns, late completion--not to mention corruption."
The fate of Chicago and other bid cities--and that of taxpayers inextricably linked--will be determined in October, when Olympic organizers name their lucky host for the 2016 Games.
....
Clean trainer says an imposter's magic is about doping, nothing else
Personal trainer Sal Marinello doesn't offer hocus-pocus to clients. His regimen for clients doesn't include anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, insulin-like growth factor 1 or clenbuterol.
Marinello, of Millburn, New Jersey, sells only hard-ass work in the gym and on the track. He makes no big bank account. So he scoffs at reports about allegedly exclusive secrets of so-called trainers, highly paid, who typically serve millionaire athletes or up-and-comers. These impostors boast no special training expertise, Marinello retorts; they're hired as drug conduits for big results in the short term and more shady practices, like evading testing.
"You go back to all these athletes who've been caught [for juicing]... ," says Marinello. "If you look at the people they've trained with, none of them trained with a legitimate guy. They've all 'trained' with these people like a [Brian] McNamee, who was not a trainer. You look at the guys [Mark] McGwire had contact with; they weren't legit. And, obviously, Greg Anderson was a meat head."
"Look at how A-Rod got caught now, with having these suspect connections. A guy like that could go out and find the best college strength coach and hire him, but those [trainers] are legit."
In February, as Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez was exposed for steroid use he maintains was limited to 2001-03, information surfaced of his association with Angel Presinal, a drug-tainted trainer in the Dominican Republic. The New York Daily News reported Presinal accompanied Rodriguez throughout the 2007 baseball season, including on the road, although Presinal was banned from clubhouses.
Major League Baseball barred the trainer following a 2001 incident in Toronto, where an unmarked bag containing steroids, clenbuterol and needle syringes was claimed by Presinal, said Canadian authorities. Presinal accompanied Indians star Juan Gonzalez as personal trainer in the period, and he denied involvement with doping. No charges were filed.
Today, numerous MLB stars from the D.R. vouch for Presinal, calling him a wizard of training techniques such as working giant rubber bands for arm strength.
"There's nothing revolutionary with any of that," Marinello responds in Jersey accent. "That's their cover story, ya know, for the other stuff, because [fans] are naive as to what can really be done in the gym. That's the thing: People are naive or don't wanna know. There are no new techniques."
Marinello, 46, says strength training has seen no significant advances since the 1980s, when he played college football and first heard about anabolic steroids. He's since known countless juicers in gyms and sports, gleaning information from them but avoiding their secrets for himself. Today, Marinello is a respected analyst of performance-enhancing substances, writing online blogs and commenting for media.
He advocates weightlifting with "ground-based compound movements" like squat, dead lift and military press, along with explosive lifts like the snatch and power clean. He teaches plyometrics and calisthenics along with sprinting and agility drills, and advises clients to eat well and get their rest.
But that's it, the basics. "The trainers I know that know their stuff, they're guys like me, working every day with regular folks, trying to help them improve," Marinello says. "Because it is what it is, nothing more. There are no new developments." If athletes and others aren't interested in doing drugs, he says, "there's only about six or seven exercises they should be doing."
"You don't need to hire some guy who works in the backwater of the Dominican Republic. He has no secrets. If he did, he'd be writing books and going on speaking tours and making a fortune that way."
E-mail Matt Chaney at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.
Smacking fantasy of athletics
Regular folks want 'roids too!
Chicago leaders pant for Olympics, public debt be damned
Marinello rips high-rent 'trainers' as frauds
By Matt Chaney
April 18, 2009
Typically, the presumed users of muscle dope are football players, baseball players, sprinters, pro wrestlers and bodybuilders, hunk actors--or the famous faces of headline exposure for anabolic steroids and human growth hormone.
That view is marginal, of course, distorted by media coverage. The popular press largely feeds us celebrity doping, the pop icons caught for juicing and magnified in scandal spotlight.
In everyday reality, more regular folks seek 'roids and pricey HGH than millionaire jocks. The most common users are often people near you.
Research and analysis, including sales data on Big Pharma, document insatiable world appetite for synthetic substances to enhance physique. People of all types and nationalities value a buff body, children to seniors, and many take the step of juicing for muscle, undeterred by potential risks.
"Doping among non-professional athletes continues to be underestimated and more widespread than is commonly accepted," said German professor of sport medicine Dr. Wilfried Kindermann, University of Saarland.
New York attorney Rick Collins helped direct a steroid survey that found "the typical male user is about 30 years old, well-educated, and earning an above-average income in a white-collar occupation." Collins, specializing in law on muscle drugs, said, "These findings question commonly held views of typical [steroid] users and their underlying motivations. ...
"The vast majority of [steroid] users are not athletes and hence are not likely to view themselves as cheaters."
Doper stereotypes also deflated in a groundbreaking, unheralded investigation of The San Francisco Chronicle, which concluded a variety of individuals patronized a former "wellness clinic" that sold steroids and HGH online from Florida. The Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center was closed by police raids two years ago, leading to arrests and criminal convictions, and The Chronicle performed computer analysis of 66,000 records seized, with special focus on about 2,200 customers who wrote of their motives for juicing.
Obesity and sexual dysfunction were the focus clientèle's primary reasons for seeking steroids and HGH; amateur athletics ranked a distant third, followed by body aging. Overwhelmingly, customers of the Internet drug operation were "ordinary people with an array of medical, physical and emotional complaints," Lance Williams reported for The Chronicle.
The journalists' breakdown of all records revealed sales staff sold or communicated about prescription muscle drugs to clients in 50 U.S. states and dozens more countries, including housewives, school kids, retirees, construction workers, pastors, elementary teachers, prep coaches, college professors, soldiers, cops, firefighters and government officials.
Among provocative findings by the newspaper, Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center received e-mail queries from 400 people at colleges and universities, with the majority apparently students, representing campuses like Yale, Harvard and UC-Berkeley. More than 80 government employees inquired from agencies such as the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Homeland Security, NASA and Veterans Affairs. Two U.N. officials made contact from abroad.
People found the PBRC through Web surfing, magazine advertising, and word on the street. Sales were $38 million over six years, Williams reported, with "only a handful" of pro athletes, none a superstar, named on client rolls of the shuttered business.
The vast majority of customers represented Everyman, thousands of common folks seeking 'roids and HGH, driven by "faith that their problems would be solved if only they could obtain drugs that their own physicians wouldn't prescribe to them," Williams summarized.
....
Chicago leads cities vying to drop silly money on Olympics
Looks like once again American taxpayers local and federal will feed the world-class money pit of sport, a cost-bloated Olympic Games, and this time for Chicago, Illinois. Yep, the city and state racked by chasm deficits and political scandal, often unable to pay employees and vendors, need us to underwrite their bid for hosting Olympic Games 2016.
The Olympics' sprawling layout for a region involves myriad costs and politics, hazy in public detail, a scam that dwarfs the common ripoff for a U.S. city that funds a stadium or arena. Instead of losing millions for taxpayers, Olympic red ink bleeds billions of dollars.
Fiscal disasters include the Athens Games 2004, with enormous cost-overruns for a city and country torn today by class strife, and Beijing 2008, where the ludicrous tab was $43 billion as area peasants steered ox carts along dirt roads. Now Beijing's atrocious "Bird's Nest" stadium, too large for normal events, is being refit for a shopping mall at cost equaling its construction completion of last year.
Olympic-sized folly plagues future hosts, fostering unrest in alarmed citizenry.
Winter Games 2010 at Vancouver is a funding burden on all Canadians, with unforeseen billions in expenses and lack of disclosure by officials, say critics like author Chris Shaw, professor at University of British Columbia. "The costs have gone through the stratosphere. It's $7 billion so far--that we know about," Shaw told Tom Tresser, in an interview published online by The Huffington Post. "We have taken on massive debt that will probably take 30 years to pay off."
London and the UK likewise reel over spiraling costs for Summer Games 2012, expenses topping $17 billion, triple the original estimate and sure to go higher.
"The Winter Games tend to come in at $10 billion and the Summer Games should cost a total of $20 billion," Shaw said. "I've heard laughable estimates of security for the Chicago bid at $45 million. Total security for the Vancouver games are at $1 billion, with the city's share at least $100 million."
At Chicago, laughable estimates, rationale and opinion flow from the city's elite fleet, cheap talk from politicians and celebrities, in their united quest to land Olympics 2016. Local media, for their part, are generally cool to the idea while staunch opposition rears in groups like No Games Chicago, which counts Tresser among members.
In typical scenario for any locality, power brokers endorse an Olympics for the switching of public resources to private hands through faulty subsidy and more shady allowances, Shaw alleges, and he sees the sting going down in Chicago.
America could also count on the International Olympic Committee and cronies, such as the USOC, to snatch any "proceeds" for a Chicago Games, after taxpayers would carry most construction and operations.
"This is part of a larger privatization movement and a local version of a larger global trend--that is, the taking away of the commons and making the public pay for what was theirs," said Shaw, author of Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games. "This is about putting the local community on the hook for private gain."
Chicago stands as clear favorite for the 2016 Games despite a comical bid package, impossible in objectives, assertions. Chicago leaders predict profit for all people after total costs around $4.5 billion, at virtually no risk to the public, an outlook more absurd than stupid-low estimations by rival cities Tokyo, Madrid and Rio.
Whatever. The IOC covets American sites for staging Games, always ready to savor our markets, corporate sponsors, mega-media and domestic security. But as Olympic organizers need America, we can always do without them. Anywhere's modern citizen is better off watching Olympic Games on TV, via satellite from someone else's country, on someone else's dime.
Last week, a rather underwhelmed Chicago populace watched civic leaders roll out the red carpet for visiting Olympic officials, who returned love. The IOC delegation enjoyed warm greetings by Chicago luminaries President Barack Obama and Michael Jordan, who both made pitches by video, and Oprah Winfrey, billionaire TV queen who appeared in person at an Olympics booster party.
Winfrey couldn't feel concerns of protesters in the street. A Chicago Olympics is "going to be big, it's huge, it's enormous," Winfrey said, speaking to media and spying a few dozen opposition folks outside the IOC gala, as they watched her go inside on that red carpet. "I don't understand what they're complaining about," Winfrey said, proclaiming an Olympics spectacle would be "good for everyone."
As Oprah expounded, Chicago city faced a deficit of about $200 million while the Illinois budget shortfall was about $11 billion, among terrible news on capital losses. Thousands of Illinois jobs were gone. And Rod Blagojevich, impeached gubernatorial clown, faced federal charges for corruption, bidding himself to be the second consecutive Illinois governor in prison following George Ryan.
Old Town resident Rhoda Whitehorse knew reality, as a protester representing No Games Chicago. "The city is broke, the state is broke," Whitehorse said. "Chicago has a deep history of cost overruns, late completion--not to mention corruption."
The fate of Chicago and other bid cities--and that of taxpayers inextricably linked--will be determined in October, when Olympic organizers name their lucky host for the 2016 Games.
....
Clean trainer says an imposter's magic is about doping, nothing else
Personal trainer Sal Marinello doesn't offer hocus-pocus to clients. His regimen for clients doesn't include anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, insulin-like growth factor 1 or clenbuterol.
Marinello, of Millburn, New Jersey, sells only hard-ass work in the gym and on the track. He makes no big bank account. So he scoffs at reports about allegedly exclusive secrets of so-called trainers, highly paid, who typically serve millionaire athletes or up-and-comers. These impostors boast no special training expertise, Marinello retorts; they're hired as drug conduits for big results in the short term and more shady practices, like evading testing.
"You go back to all these athletes who've been caught [for juicing]... ," says Marinello. "If you look at the people they've trained with, none of them trained with a legitimate guy. They've all 'trained' with these people like a [Brian] McNamee, who was not a trainer. You look at the guys [Mark] McGwire had contact with; they weren't legit. And, obviously, Greg Anderson was a meat head."
"Look at how A-Rod got caught now, with having these suspect connections. A guy like that could go out and find the best college strength coach and hire him, but those [trainers] are legit."
In February, as Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez was exposed for steroid use he maintains was limited to 2001-03, information surfaced of his association with Angel Presinal, a drug-tainted trainer in the Dominican Republic. The New York Daily News reported Presinal accompanied Rodriguez throughout the 2007 baseball season, including on the road, although Presinal was banned from clubhouses.
Major League Baseball barred the trainer following a 2001 incident in Toronto, where an unmarked bag containing steroids, clenbuterol and needle syringes was claimed by Presinal, said Canadian authorities. Presinal accompanied Indians star Juan Gonzalez as personal trainer in the period, and he denied involvement with doping. No charges were filed.
Today, numerous MLB stars from the D.R. vouch for Presinal, calling him a wizard of training techniques such as working giant rubber bands for arm strength.
"There's nothing revolutionary with any of that," Marinello responds in Jersey accent. "That's their cover story, ya know, for the other stuff, because [fans] are naive as to what can really be done in the gym. That's the thing: People are naive or don't wanna know. There are no new techniques."
Marinello, 46, says strength training has seen no significant advances since the 1980s, when he played college football and first heard about anabolic steroids. He's since known countless juicers in gyms and sports, gleaning information from them but avoiding their secrets for himself. Today, Marinello is a respected analyst of performance-enhancing substances, writing online blogs and commenting for media.
He advocates weightlifting with "ground-based compound movements" like squat, dead lift and military press, along with explosive lifts like the snatch and power clean. He teaches plyometrics and calisthenics along with sprinting and agility drills, and advises clients to eat well and get their rest.
But that's it, the basics. "The trainers I know that know their stuff, they're guys like me, working every day with regular folks, trying to help them improve," Marinello says. "Because it is what it is, nothing more. There are no new developments." If athletes and others aren't interested in doing drugs, he says, "there's only about six or seven exercises they should be doing."
"You don't need to hire some guy who works in the backwater of the Dominican Republic. He has no secrets. If he did, he'd be writing books and going on speaking tours and making a fortune that way."
E-mail Matt Chaney at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.
Posted by Matt Chaney at 4/11/2009 8:45 AM 
Categories: Commentary
Tags: subsidy performance-enhancing teens funding stadium trainer steroids doping Olympics public growth hormone
Categories: Commentary
Tags: subsidy performance-enhancing teens funding stadium trainer steroids doping Olympics public growth hormone
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