Jamie Mantzouridis vividly remembers the first time he took steroids. He got someone else to inject him and his mind was racing. “What if he hit an artery? What if there was an air bubble?” Mantzouridis, however, says he was young and fearless.
He was small growing up, skinny and self-conscious. By the time he started training seriously in his early 20s, he noticed other guys at the gym who were much larger, and they explained they were taking steroids. “They looked really good,” he says, “and they said that was what they were doing.”
He was 21, and impulsive. “Fundamentally, doing everything correctly, steroids can fast-track your results,” he says. “But it’s not a direct cheat code. And it can come with risks which are quite dramatic.”
His first cycle was trenbolone – a powerful compound developed for cattle, and among the harshest anabolics available. Getting it was easy, he says. “All you need to do is ask the biggest guy in the gym … They’ll either supply you with it or point you in the right direction.”
Within a year the results were visible, but so were the side effects. Acne spread across his back and chest, bad enough that he stopped wanting to take his shirt off. Then, one evening, a routine injection went wrong. The needle was not quite in the right muscle; he adjusted it rather than starting again with a clean one. It became infected. He spent a week in hospital on antibiotics. “They said I was lucky,” he says. “That they didn’t have to cut tissue out of your leg.”
He lied to his mother about why he was there. She did not believe him. “She’d spoken to the doctors,” he says. “She was like: ‘Why are you talking shit?’”
He kept going. At 22, a hospital stay does not feel like a warning sign as much as an inconvenience. “When you’re young, you don’t develop that sense that this is doing damage in the long run,” he says. “You worry about it in 10 years’ time.”
Over the next few years, he experimented with growth hormones and insulin, a drug meant for diabetic people, taken off-label by bodybuilders to help push carbohydrate into the muscle, and one capable of sending a healthy person into a hypoglycaemic coma. “Short-term, it’s incredibly dangerous,” he says. “Long-term, anabolics are worse. You just don’t see the damage straight away.”
The end came in a bathtub about four years ago. “I remember feeling really dizzy,” he says. “I had to run out and get some sugar because I felt like I was going to collapse.”
He says: “I thought: ‘This is fucked. What am I doing to myself?’” He stopped that day.
Mantzouridis, 29, now works as a nutritionist and online personal trainer. He says there is a lot of pressure on men nowadays around body image, partly due to social media. “Everyone believes they’re meant to look a certain way,” he says. “That someone successful has a Ferrari and a six-pack. Some people will never achieve that, and it stops you acknowledging what you have achieved.”
