Get-big Pharma “The scandal shattered our image of athletes as clean-living”

At 52 years old, Arnold looks like a man who has benefited from the highs of his own supply. His muscular physique is, in large part, the result of lifelong experimentation. Born in Guilford, Connecticut, he began lifting weights as an adolescent. But although he maintained a strict diet and trained smart, he felt something was lacking.

“I was getting stronger but my body stayed scrawny,” he recalls. “It’s not that I wanted to look like Mr Universe, but I felt entitled, given the work I was putting in, to see at least some of that bulk. It’s a problem many guys go up against, through no fault of their own. A large percentage of men will eat the right things and do the right training but not get the shape they want due to genetics.”

Arnold discovered steroids through a friend at his local gym. Within a fortnight of beginning his new regimen he began to see the results that had eluded him. Inspired, he enrolled at the University of New Haven, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He soon secured a job at a large pharmaceutical research company, allowing him all the time he needed to perform his own experiments.

“In order to make better steroids, I went back to the chemical logs of formulas that had been patented but never used,” Arnold explains. “So, for instance, there were steroids that had been used in East German state-sponsored doping programmes, or steroids that had been abandoned because of certain side- effects. I carried out experiments to find out how these drugs really manifested. If something seemed promising, I tried it out.”

Arnold’s testing of sketchy anabolics led to numerous highly detailed reports that were posted to the early bodybuilding dark web, positioning him as a sage presence in the world of performance enhancement. It wasn’t long before Conte made contact and proposed working together. He was looking for steroids and performance