Gym junkie

A trip to the local bodybuilders’ gym under the influence of muscle drugs

If you want to get ahead in sports, there’s nothing better than a nice big helping of performance-enhancing drugs. Just ask the guys on the Tour de France. At the end of last month the Spanish cyclist and three-times Tour winner Alberto Contador was banned from cycling after testing positive for the illegal anabolic agent Clenbuterol. He says that he accidentally ate it in a steak his mate brought him from Spain.

You have to agree it’s a great excuse. I have a feeling I wheeled out that line, or a very similar one, to my appalled mother after returning green-faced and soused in my own bile from a house party in the mid-1990s. But in the mid-1990s I was a teenage nobhead from rural Buckinghamshire, not an elite athlete with three Tour de France wins to my name.