Aussie swimmer James Magnussen has learned that performance-enhancing drugs are not the magic ticket to riches this year and has opened up on how his recent doping body transformation actually made him slower.
Magnussen won silver in the 100-metre freestyle at the 2012 London Olympics and gold at the 2011 and 2013 World Championships before retiring from the ‘clean’ versions of the sport in 2019.
His personal best of 47.10 seconds made him the fastest swimmer ever in a textile suit at the time.
Now the former world champion has announced his plan to compete in the Enhanced Games, a controversial event that encourages performance-enhancing drugs, which are banned in traditional sport.
Magnussen said he would use banned substances to attempt a 50-metre freestyle world record and was poised to achieve that result earlier this year – only to be upstaged by Greece’s Kristian Gkolomeev.
The Aussie was lining up at an Enhanced Games meet in the United States to promote the upcoming event where $1million was on the line for anybody who could break the 50m world record.
Aussie swimmer James Magnussen recently revealed a very different physique after agreeing to compete for $1million USD in the Enhanced Games
The Aussie freestyler put on a ridiculous amount of muscle thanks to his medically supervised course of performance-enhancing drugs
Magnussen was dubbed The Missile in his Olympics days because of his tall, lean figure and sheer speed
Gkolomeev clocked 20.89 seconds, boosted by banned substances and a non-Olympic-approved polyurethane suit – 0.02 seconds quicker than the supersuit world record set by Brazil’s Cesar Cielo at the 2009 world championships.
And The Missile, speaking on the Hello Sport podcast, was not happy about losing out on the $1million USD challenge he had been aiming for himself.
‘Kristian cruises in after eight weeks of protocol. He gets up and bam, breaks the world record in the week that supposed to be about me breaking this world record,’ Magnussen said.
‘It was a really weird feeling, it was really mixed emotions.
‘I love Kristian, he’s a great guy. He’s had a really tough life, lost both parents. That million dollars for him was him was completely life changing. It was more money that he’d ever made in his entire swimming career.
‘So I was happy for him but that was meant to be me doing that. That was a hard moment.’
The Aussie will have another chance to claim the title and the cash when he competes the first official Enhanced Games next year.
But he admits there will be plenty of tweaking to both his training and doping regime before then.
Magnussen said the performance-enhancing drugs had initially enabled him to glide through training and lift enormous weights
But the Aussie said that quickly went backwards as he became too top-heavy and recorded worse times in the pool than when he was not doping
Images have emerged of Magnussen looking more like He-Man than the lean body that earned him the nickname The Missile before he retired from the sport six years ago.
And he admits there had been issues with taking the performance-enhancing drugs to bulk up for the pool.
‘I gained 10 pounds, or five kilos, in the first week, of lean muscle,’ the Missile revealed.
‘There was points during that process where my athleticism was through the roof.
‘For the first seven weeks I was in the [United] States, I trained twice a day, every day. So 49 days straight, 98 sessions straight with no rest.
‘The most relevant for swimming at certain periods were box squats. So you squat down to like a bench, sit on the bench and then stand up with the barbell.
‘I was doing that with 500 pounds, which is about 230 kilos, just sets of three, bouncing like it was nothing.
‘And so what we saw was performance tracked like this, really steeply. It plateued around that Christmas time, and then it started to decrease.’
Magnussen admits he had bulked up too much when the photos were taken and will need to find balance to achieve his best result in the pool.
‘I started getting too big, my nervous system’s fried, I’m having trouble with that top end speed stuff, from that explosivity, and my metrics start trending down.
‘So it was taking about four people 30 minutes to get me into a suit.’
