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They’re in a Rage About ‘Roids

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We mortals don’t know what it’s like to be a star athlete. We don’t know what it’s like to have to depend on a finely tuned body to keep the paychecks coming in or to compete at elite levels.

And if you think of an athlete’s body as a vital piece of machinery requiring constant maintenance, you can understand the temptation to fire it up with the most high-octane fuel there is.

Which brings us to a discussion about illegal steroids with Mike Rangel, the 48-year-old personal trainer to four world-class volleyball players and owner of an Orange County fitness company, which also trains thousands of anonymous other athletes, mainly from 8 to 18, in nine states.

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If you think that Rangel dares not speak the name of steroids, you’re wrong. For someone who spends his life around athletes, he can denounce steroids all he wants but he’d be a fool to pretend they don’t exist.

As if any sports fans nowadays can escape steroid talk, even if they wanted to.

“What it boils down to is that steroids give you an edge,” Rangel says. “It’s documented that they make you quicker, faster, stronger. And the temptation is staggering because we live in a competitive society that only rewards the gold medalist.”

He’s speaking figuratively, but you get his point. We’re not a society that pays much attention to also-rans, even at the highest levels of competition.

Rangel is a devotee of plyometrics, a workout regimen with Russian roots that emphasizes repetitive jumping exercises as a way to increase quickness and jumping ability or, as the jocks like to call it, explosiveness.

His star pupils are Olympians Karch Kiraly, Mike Lambert, Misty May and Kerri Walsh. At a time when newspapers are littered with athletes-on-drugs stories, Rangel says the four represent a different group: those who hit the heights drug-free.

“Let me tell you how committed Karch is,” Rangel says. “Let me blow you away. We’ve trained on Christmas Eve, on New Year’s morning, on the day he got back from Japan on a 12-hour flight, the day after he won the Huntington Beach Open two years ago ... because he didn’t feel he got enough of a workout.”

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Less than two weeks ago, Rangel says, the four volleyball superstars were training on the beach when steroid talk came up. “It was about how frustrated we are,” Rangel says, “particularly Karch, at the age of 44 now, who was the points champion last year, won three tournaments and was 100% drug-free.”

Even more so than we laymen, world-class athletes understand the temptation to make the steroid deal with the devil. An athlete already working hard lifting weights, for example, must wonder what a pill or a shot would do for him. A home-run hitter in the Top 10 in the league surely will contemplate how many guys he could climb over if he augmented his workout regimen with “the juice.”

“I can tell you right now I’d have been tempted,” says Rangel, who was a college volleyball player in the 1970s. But he’s talking about it in a different context. “It crossed my mind for my own son,” he says, referring to his college-age son who’s also a volleyball player.

“What do I need for my son to get a scholarship? I think a lot of parents are going to go through that. I thought about it. How does my son get bigger? He’s got a small frame, but he’s already got a tremendous jump.”

Rangel is quick to say, however, that he never took it to the next step of discussing it with his son, but he’s making the point that abuse can start that innocently. “Every kid in high school has to think, ‘What if?’ ” Rangel says.

And sometimes the pressure a young athlete feels from his parents may lead to steroid abuse, he says.

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We can lament all we want, but Rangel suspects steroids are here to stay.

“I don’t think we’ll rid our society of them anymore,” he says. “We’re always going to have people trying to beat the system. Cheaters have been around all our lives.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.

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