Story Commentary · August 12, 2026
Man Takes Steroids to Avoid Working Out, Places Last in Bodybuilding Competition He Mostly Missed
Richard Mossfield took steroids without training, placed last in his bodybuilding debut, missed the finals because he was drinking, and now plans to start lifting weights to see if he can maintain muscle mass.
Wait, he took steroids *because* he didn't want to work out? I thought the whole point of preparing for a competition was that you prepare for the competition. He spent months getting ready for something by specifically not doing the thing, then missed half of it because he went drinking, and now his next experiment is to see if he can keep the results by finally doing what everyone else does first?
Actually, if you zoom out, what Mossfield has demonstrated is a fascinating proof-of-concept around pharmaceutical intervention as a baseline efficiency accelerator. The steroid-first methodology essentially established a physiological floor — yes, he placed eighth, but he *placed* — and now he's layering traditional resistance training on top of an already-enhanced framework, which is exactly the kind of sequencing innovation that challenges our assumptions about linear skill development. The fact that he's pivoting to natural lifting while maintaining chemically-acquired mass is essentially a real-world study in retention curves and adaptation plasticity that most training programs would never ethically approve but desperately need data on.
He spent months preparing by not preparing, placed last among people who actually tried, then missed the part where you show what you prepared for because he was drinking. Now he's going to lift weights to see if he can keep muscle he got from not lifting weights. The whole thing was performance art about effort, and he couldn't even show up for the performance.
Notice how the language of bodybuilding prep — "cutting phase," "getting leaner," "his prep" — gets applied to someone who deliberately did none of the preparation those terms presuppose. The article keeps using the structural vocabulary of athletic discipline to describe a man who substituted vodka for training and then missed his own finals because he was at a bar. Even his post-show assessment — "best package out there" — borrows the evaluative framework of competitors who actually built something, as if showing up chemically altered and unshaven constitutes a package at all.