Belgian Bodybuilders Refuse Drug Tests, Championship Canceled

When it comes to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, no sport is completely clean and no sport is completely dirty. But on the clean to dirty spectrum, the sport that's probably the farthest on the "dirty" side is bodybuilding, those beauty pageants of musculature in which competitors are judged by the bulges in their biceps and the thickness of their thighs. And now a bodybuilding competition in Belgium has reached a new low.

The bodybuilding championships in Belgium were canceled over the weekend when a drug tester showed up and the competitors simply packed their belongings and fled at the sight of him. The Associated Press reports:

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

"I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again," doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

Twenty bodybuilders were entered in the weekend competition.

Cooman says the sport has a history of doping "and this incident didn't do its reputation any good."

When Belgian bodybuilders were tested last year, three-fourths of them were found to have steroids in their systems.