Goran "Sven" Svensson was understandably proud of his showing at the U.S. Track and Field Championships earlier this summer. On the return flight from the meet to his adopted home in Provo, when a knowledgeable passenger asked about his performance, Svensson said, "I threw 215 (feet)" - then added, "that's a clean PR (personal record)."
In the athletic lexicon "clean" means one thing: he performed without the aid of anabolic steroids, which wasn't always the case before, during and after his collegiate career at BYU, where he once took steroids as part of a school research project.Svensson, a native of Sweden who became a U.S. citizen earlier this year, says he used steroids from 1979 to 1985. During that time, he was a domestic force, winning the NCAA Track and Field Championships as a sophomore in 1980, finishing third the next two years and setting a collegiate record.
But in 1985, he and countryman Lars Sundin, another BYU student, flunked a steroid test at the Norwegian national meet. They were suspended from competition for 18 months. Svensson decided then to quit using steroids.
"As you get older and you have a family, you start wondering if it's worth putting all these drugs into your system for basically no reward," he explains.
Now Svensson, 30, is clean and competing successfully again, although, as a father of four and a fulltime employee at the Provo Youth Detention Center, his dedication isn't what it once was (he calls the discus a hobby, although it's not a hobby in the monied Bo Jackson sense). Still, with only thrice weekly workouts he placed third at nationals and third again in last month's U.S. Olympic Festival.
Svensson aspires to the Olympics, but competing domestically and competing internationally - against Eastern Bloc athletes, particularly - are different matters.
"In the West they test their athletes (for steroids), but in the East they protect their athletes," says Svensson. "They laugh at us. I know those guys."
Early in his career Svensson opposed steroid use; eventually he changed his mind: "The reason you do it is this: you know you have the skill to be world-class. If you have a Formula 1 car, you don't want to put a Formula 3 engine in it. That is the difference. When you want to compete on a world-class level, you must decide if you will take it or not. I thought I really didn't have a choice. I have since told myself that was an error." Svensson says this one minute, but the next he's saying, "If this were not just a hobby, if I were as bloodthirsty as I was, I'd still be doing it." Then again, he says, "There should be some way no one even has to bother with steroids."
The vicious circle of competition is not easily resolved.
In the fallout of the Ben Johnson affair, it's easy to condemn such everyone-else-is-doing-it-so-must-I thinking, as well as steroid use in general, but Svensson and his peers would have you believe the sports world was a different place when they began using steroids. "Everyone did it, everyone talked about it," he says.
For a time, steroids were used, if not quite openly, at least with a measure of acceptance. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that the NCAA and the NFL got serious about cracking down on steroids (indeed, even after Sundin's international suspension in '85, he continued to compete for BYU through '86). One former world-class discus thrower says national team doctors offered him steroids and regarded them as being in the class of vitamins. A former local collegiate team doctor says he once provided steroids for athletes until he realized their harmful side effects. Both the University of Utah and BYU conducted their own steroid programs with some of their athletes.
Svensson says he was open with then-BYU Head Coach Clarence Robison about his steroid use, and adds, "He wasn't responsible. It wasn't illegal then. There was nothing wrong with it (according to NCAA rules). He understood the situation."
At the time, Svensson was using steroids "4 to 8 weeks at a time, two or three times a year, depending on what I could get a hold of." Evading tests was usually no problem. "There are places in the U.S. where you can go to see if you will pass the tests," says Svensson, who says he obtained his steroid supply from the Soviet Union.
"There's absolutely no question in my mind that steroids do what they're supposed to do," says Svensson. "They do not enhance athletic performance. You still have to have the ability and you still must do the work. But you can do more work. You can get stronger much faster. You can recuperate faster. You can do a tremendous workout one day, and the next day you may be able to do another tremendous workout again."
Since quitting steroids, Svensson has seen his weight drop 20 pounds, to 238, and his bench press drop 40 pounds, to 500. But, much to his delight, he has lost little distance in throwing the discus, partly because the event requires at least as much technique as raw strength.
"Ultimately, I think you can be equally strong (without steroids)," says Svensson. "It just takes longer. Most (athletes) don't have the patience . . . I can't say if my base level of strength would be different now if I hadn't ever taken steroids. If I'm honest, I'd say I have benefitted from them."
To his credit, Svensson has, late in his career, found the patience to take the longer training route. Who knows how far it will take him. But his rivals would do well to follow his example.