http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/s...ut-he-has-a-story.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all
A little over two weeks ago, though, Ramos was declared a cheat, the oldest steroid doper ever caught by the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
He does not deny that he took synthetic testosterone, a banned substance. He has been taking it for 20 years, he said, with a prescription from a doctor — a practice common among aging men, even those with no competitive ambitions, to combat naturally falling levels of the hormone.
But after a recent competition in Chicago, Ramos’s testosterone level was found to be extraordinarily high, more than twice the typical reading for someone his age. He was suspended from competition for two years and did not appeal the ruling.
“Do I consider myself a cheater?” Ramos said, mulling the question. “I never thought of myself that way. I feel like I’m just keeping myself healthy.”
Ramos’s life is a Forrest Gumpian odyssey, most of it verifiable. His claim about being a well-known dance instructor in New York City leads to his quotations in a New York Times article from 1971 on the latest crazes. A mention of his stumble into modeling leads to a full-page magazine advertisement for Playboy, with a 30-year-old Ramos relaxing next to a beautiful woman in the mid-1960s. (“What sort of man reads Playboy?” the copy begins. “A guy who enjoys life thickly carpeted.”)
Ramos enjoyed life, all right, through six marriages, fortunes and bankruptcies, and, after he turned 70, a pile of world records for weight lifting.
He can run and jump. (He wants to set high-jump records for his age but cannot figure out where to practice.) His face barely sags. His hair, in the mold of Joe Biden’s, is thin, white and combed straight back. He has no hearing aid and, thanks to eye surgery, no glasses. His resonant voice could do voice-overs.
His mind is quick. He drives fast. He covets younger women; his last serious girlfriend, when he was 66, was 33. Spend a day with him, and you could be convinced if someone said he was 58.
But all that, and all those stories, is overshadowed by what happened in June in Chicago, at the Pan American Masters Weightlifting Championships.
For his weight class, Ramos nearly broke the 80-and-over record of about 133 pounds in the snatch, in which competitors lift the bar overhead from the floor in a single motion. It might have been a surprise that he did not set a record: Ramos still holds world records for the snatch in three weight categories in the 75-79 age group. He snatched 172 pounds in 2008.
But in the clean and jerk, in which the bar is raised first to the shoulders and then overhead, Ramos broke the record by lifting about 161 pounds.
Ramos was immediately escorted to drug testing. It is done at international events, sparingly, mostly to authenticate records and weed out the occasional steroid suspects. Organizers are often ambivalent about drug testing; it legitimizes the event, but at some cost. The director of the Pan American event, Corinne Grotenhuis, paid $6,000 for Usada’s oversight, she said.
Ramos was watched closely as he urinated into a container and sealed it. He had been through the procedure many times and worried little about the results. He accepted his medal and a Grand Master award, for the best weight lifter among the 200-plus competitors. There was no prize money. There rarely is.
Then Ramos went home, alone, to his dog.
About a month later, he received a notice from Usada: he had failed the drug test. An out-of-balance ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, a related hormone in the body, gave him away.
Ramos’s doctor ordered a blood test. His testosterone level on July 29 was 1,121 nanograms per deciliter — more than twice what it should have been. Ramos stopped the injections.
A month later, a follow-up blood test found his testosterone level to be extraordinarily low, signaling a range of potential problems, affecting anything from the prostate to the pituitary glands.
