SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, April 24, 2006
The Human Cost
by Luis Fernando Llosa
One amateur bodybuilder's journey from the gym to intensive care, and the grueling rehab that followed, tells a cautionary tale of the damage that can be done by steroids
ON THE MORNING after Christmas Day 2005, Brad Cunningham complained about a searing headache and chest pains. When the 29-year-old amateur bodybuilder got up from the sofa in his mother's house in Garland, Texas, he keeled over. By the time his mother, Julia, got to a phone and called 911, Brad had fallen three times and was sprawled limply on the floor.
Cunningham is one of the many anabolic steroid users in the U.S. who have relied on Mexico--and the companies targeted in Operation Gear Grinder--as his source for the drugs. Three months after his collapse, he tells an extreme version of a tale that's all too familiar: how a healthy athlete let ambition and competitive drive blind him to the potential hazards of steroid use.
Cunningham first learned about juicing in 1994 when he was a senior at South Garland High and a backup receiver on the football team. "A bunch of my buddies took [steroids] to bulk up," says the 6-foot, 207-pound Cunningham. "I didn't have the money. If I had, I definitely would have too."
In 1998, Cunningham decided he wanted to get a little more buff. A friend supplied him with testosterone, nandralone and Winstrol (all veterinary-grade anabolics manufactured south of the Río Grande) that he'd scored from a dealer in Mesquite, Texas. "Back then everybody was driving down to Mexico and loading up, hiding the stuff in the panels of their cars," Cunningham says. He used the drugs in 90-day cycles for two years but stopped cold after he was hospitalized with a sports hernia. He'd been doing 225-pound shoulder-shrug lifts while amped up on juice and had ripped the lining of his stomach.
It wasn't until January 2004 that Cunningham--then a senior majoring in logistics at North Texas--started using again. "I wanted to be the next Ronnie Coleman," he says, referring to the eight-time Mr. Olympia.
Cunningham met a brawny personal trainer at a 24-Hour Fitness center in Dallas. "He was huge," says Cunningham. "We got to talking one day and he asked me if I had a connection. He gave me his phone number." Within weeks, says Cunningham, "I was doing about 500 milligrams of Teston QV 200 a week, stacking that with Deca QV-300 and using Winstrol and Equipoise too. I could work out hard for an hour and a half. Without steroids I'd get tired after 45 minutes." The drugs he used were made by Quality Vet, one of the companies owned by Alberto Saltiel-Cohen and a favorite brand within his circle of lifters and trainers.
Cunningham had set a goal--to become a pro bodybuilder--and he was willing to do whatever it took to reach it. So he juiced for two years straight, never once cycling off to give his body a break. After graduation last spring Cunningham held down a $38,000-a-year job handling logistics for a transportation company in Dallas while maintaining a strict regimen of powerlifting, steroids and protein consumption.
By last September--consumed by the gym culture--he'd ballooned from 189 to 250 pounds and quit his day job to lift full time, supporting himself by bartending and working part time as a personal trainer. He also supplemented his income by selling steroids to clients he met in the gym, netting up to $700 a week. (He says that he obtained the drugs through a gym dealer.)
Cunningham's plan was to win at the 2006 NPC Heart of Texas Bodybuilding, Figure & Fitness Championships, a Plano amateur contest, and then try to work his way up to the nationals. Instead he lay facedown on his mom's floor on that December morning, dying. His heart stopped and paramedics shocked him eight times, to no avail. On the ninth try he was revived, and he was rushed to Baylor Medical Center in Garland. "They gave him no chance of surviving," says Julia, her eyes welling up. "A chaplain met me at the door."
Dr. John Bret, the heart specialist who treated him at Baylor, says that Cunningham had multiple heart attacks at home and as he was being rushed to the hospital. "There was significant heart damage," he says. "You just don't see that kind of damage in a young, healthy person. Steroid use was certainly a factor." Eight days after his heart attacks, Cunningham suffered a stroke that paralyzed his left side. Told the disability was probably permanent, he attacked rehabilitation with the intensity he had previously reserved for bodybuilding.
After three months of daily six-hour rehab sessions, Cunningham is walking again. He still has a limp, hasn't regained full use of the fingers on his left hand and is taking nine medications daily. Asked how he feels about the crackdown on the Mexican steroid pipeline, he says, "It's good that [those involved] were taken down, because it will save kids' lives."
