I've read the same stories about Olympic athletes, football players, and just about any other industry you can think of...people overcoming obstacles in life...choosing a sport or interest to try and keep a focus on something other than getting in trouble, stealing, etc..
And it's just as sad in those cases you mention. Popular thought only considers laborers as "good folks." Everyone else is a thief of some sort.
Why can't we just marvel at his physique? Because it's vain? Yes: it has to be made acceptable and can only be appreciated
as a product of dedication to an ideal. We are slaves to guiding spirits, to ideals. To outside "guiding forces" which direct our "poor, wretched souls" to salvation.
The bodybuilder SHOULD be above such things. He wants a great body, and he gets it! That is his achievement. Not gruelingly stuffing dry chicken and rice down his throat, not slavishly blasting his muscles, not picking up massive weights. These are by-products. And yet bodybuilders everywhere are forced to bow down to the stupidity of the people, and pretend they too are only good by virtue of their "hard work" -- which, as I've pointed out before, is usually not hard at all, because they love to do it.
In the end, we honor not the physique, but the "work" behind it. So kids grow up thinking that this work is what is important, and not actually the enjoyment of building a superior body (and whether a superior body is built at all even becomes inconsequential, in the worst case). They endeavor to make the work as hard and miserable as possible so they might achieve the best physique possible, and perhaps even more importantly,
the most honorable physique possible. It's a sad state of affairs, considering the origin of bodybuilding: building a better body than the next guy, making yourself look better than him. There's nothing "honorable" in the modern sense about this, and so it will never agree, despite the disgusting efforts of moralizers everywhere, with all the bogus speech about "hard work" and "dedication."
The bodybuilder is made ashamed of himself, and turned into a liar precisely by this process. Why does anyone have trouble admitting drug use? Because it shatters the illusion of superior character ("genetics") first, and detracts from one's "good, honest work" second. Why does anyone lie about how much weight they can lift, or how much time they spend in the gym, or how much they eat? None of this makes any difference to the physique, after all! But if they don't eat 8 times a day, if they don't train once in the morning and once at night, if they don't have "real muscles" which can lift "heavy weights," then they are no longer enviable in the eyes of the common laborer, who is ubiquitous and understands only these virtues, and otherwise would give no honor to the bodybuilder whatsoever. In fact he actively looks to degrade him at all times, being jealous of his body, and has almost completely succeeded with his newfound knowledge of steroids. Now that the average man knows about steroids, the guise of the "hard working, virtuous athlete" has been almost entirely stripped from the bodybuilder, and he is widely seen as a drug addicted narcissist with severe mental problems.
It's too bad the bodybuilder can't accept himself. He only makes his case worse by trying to trick everyone with his appeals to laborer/slave virtues... it's a thin disguise, and easily seen through at this point. Instead of being a direct liar in addition to a shady fraud, he should make like Groink and appeal to his physical superiority, which eats constantly at the hearts of his detractors.
