If You Rank Holyfield a Top-10 ATG...

I was going to reply to another poster in the "Top 10" thread, but I thought this topic was significant enough to warrant its own thread.

Evander Holyfield has had an impressive heavyweight career and certainly has to be ranked among the elite heavyweight of his generation.

However, there is very little doubt that Evander Holyfield has used "steroids" (and to save time, by "steroids" I mean a catchall term for various anabolic agents and trophic hormones, and exclude corticosteroids) during his career. Because boxing, like professional baseball, was largely ignorant of the extent of steroid use during the 90s, Holyfield received little scrutinty to this effect during his heavyweight prime and was only caught with his hand in the juice jar in recent years.

For those of you who rank Holyfield hightly on an all-time heavyweight basis, does his use of steroids affect your placement? If irrefutable evidence came to light proving that Holyfield had been abusing steroids since he made the leap to the heavyweight ranks in the early-90s (and thus was "on steroids" for all of his heavyweight bouts) would that disqualify him from your rankings?

 

Let's not play lawyerball with the facts. Mark McGwire has never failed a steroid test either, while Rafael Palmiero testified to Congress that he'd never touch the stuff just months before he tested positive himself.

A man with Holyfield's birthdate and Holyfield's personal cell phone number repeatedly ordered steroids from Applied Pharmacy in Mobile, Alabama in 2004. The details came out this February shortly after the pharmacy was raided by federal agents, with several other professional athletes being implicated for purchasing from the same pharmacy.

Story on SI.com

 

From the article:

"We spoke with several officials with the Nevada Athletic Commission, and while HGH is on a list of banned substances, boxers are not tested for it."

Given this fact, the exculpatory power of, "Evander...has not, to my knowledge failed a test" has to be considered worthless.

But this isn't about something as trivial as matters of law, "guilty" vs "not guilty". No jury is going to rule that Holyfield's heavyweight career received an unfair boost due to his reliance on under-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Your standard of legal "guilt" or "non-guilt" doesn't really factor into this.

 

We're not talking about sending Evander to jail.

If you want the truth, here's the truth:

A man with Holyfield's private phone number, living at a non-existent address ("794 Evander") and sharing Holyfield's birthdate repeatedly purchased steroids from a pharmacy which also provided steroids to numerous other professional athletes.

Again, this isn't about legal culpability or standards of evidence, admissibility, or any of that other lawyerly bull****; how Johnny Cochrane would bamboozle the evidence shouldn't matter here.

 

Widely? 1950s, early-60s.

 

IIRC, testosterone was first synthesized in the late-30s. That would be considered the first synthetic steroid hormone. I don't believe it was used for performance-enhancement until after the war, when Soviet scientists began to experiment with human subjects.