Bigger Stronger Faster

Pop culture junkies tend to think of Hulk Hogan, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as entertainment figures. In Poughkeepsie, NY, back in the 1980s, filmmaker Christopher Bell and his brothers viewed them as heroes and became bodybuilders. Like the Hulkster, Mike and Mark Bell even turned to professional wrestling. Chris, a former staffer at Venice’s famous Gold’s Gym, doesn’t use anabolic steroids–he did try them once–but his heroes have and his brothers do, leading him to look deeper at this increasingly common practice.

While Bell explores the health costs of juicing, he’s mostly concerned with the moral consequences involved in the use of performance-enhancing substances. Though he refrains from judgment, he stopped taking steroids because it felt dishonest. Naturally, his burly brothers feel otherwise. Aside from his family, Bell speaks with doctors, lawyers, congressmen, gym rats, and professional athletes, like Olympic sprinters Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis and Tour de France cyclist Floyd Landis.

He also includes footage of José Canseco, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire testifying during the federal grand jury and congressional hearings on steroid use in the major leagues (prompted by the publication of Canseco’s Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big). For the most part, Bell doesn’t leave any stone unturned and the personal nature of his entertaining and enlightening inquiry elevates Bigger, Stronger, Faster, i.e. The Side Effects of Being American, above your average exposé. Recommended to athletes, sports fans, health nuts, and of course, pop culture junkies

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The War On Doping

In the run up to the opening of the 30th Olympic Games of modern times, in London, the United Kingdom, from July 27 to August 12, UNESCO will host, on June 7, 2012, a first-ever pre-release screening of the documentary film "The War on Doping." The film presents the first decades in the campaign against doping in sport.

This is a trailer of the one hour documentary about the fight on doping in sports. It shows some of the faces involved and touches some of the issues that has been going on for more than 40 years. In this film, and for the first time, the world's most respected authority in the subject, the renown doping hunter, Professor Arne Ljungqvist, will guide us through all of them. The big scandals. The big names. The inside story. A mirror of society.

Doping in pro sport? Is it common practice or rare as talking bananas?

Doping forever

Danish documentary. It's like Supersize Me with steroids. Guy uses steroids to shape his body in a documentary!

 Doping in Sports: Personal, Cultural and Athletic Impact

THE RUNNING MAN (1987)

 

this post-apocalyptic science fiction satirized American entertainment, mocking pro wrestling, game shows, and law-and-order reality programming. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards, a cop in the totalitarian America of 2019, framed for massacring rioting civilians during a famine. After escaping from jail, Richards tries to prove his innocence, but his efforts are thwarted at every turn by a regime in need of a scapegoat. Richards is captured along with an innocent civilian, Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), and they are forced to participate in a violent game show called "The Running Man,"

Rollerball

(1975) An American dystopian fiction film

The film's title is the name of a violent, globally popular sport around which the events of the film take place. It is similar to Roller Derby in that two teams clad in body armor skate on roller skates (some instead ride on motorcycles) around a banked, circular track. There, however, the similarity ends.

Death Race 2000