COLORADO SPRINGS — Don Ramos is 80. His square jaw looks chiseled from rock, and his biceps, when flexed, looks as if it swallowed a softball. He holds several weight-lifting world records for his age group and can still lift more than 160 pounds off the ground and raise it over his head.
A little over two weeks ago, though, Ramos was declared a cheat, the oldest steroid doper ever caught by the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
He does not deny that he took synthetic testosterone, a banned substance. He has been taking it for 20 years, he said, with a prescription from a doctor — a practice common among aging men, even those with no competitive ambitions, to combat naturally falling levels of the hormone.
But after a recent competition in Chicago, Ramos's testosterone level was found to be extraordinarily high, more than twice the typical reading for someone his age. He was suspended from competition for two years and did not appeal the ruling.
"Do I consider myself a cheater?" Ramos said, mulling the question. "I never thought of myself that way. I feel like I'm just keeping myself healthy."
Doping in sports is most commonly associated with high-profile offenders like Lance Armstrong and Alex Rodriguez, superstars with bulging contracts to match their muscles. But most of the athletes caught in recent years for using steroids and other banned substances have been little-known amateurs in small-time competitions.
The list of the more than 20 athletes caught this year by Usada includes a 30-year-old player of boccia, a Paralympic sport similar to bocce; a 49-year-old Paralympic sailor; and a 64-year-old hammer thrower. Last year, a 56-year-old Paralympic archer received a warning for a doping rules violation. In 2011, three athletes in their 60s were caught.
None received the attention that Ramos did. With one urine sample, 80 years of life dissolved into a likely epitaph. But Ramos is far more than an easy punch line.
"I've got a good story" is how Ramos would start, again and again, on his way to detailed accounts of his life, as the son of a carousing bandleader and his dancer wife, who once hired a young girl now known as Judy Garland to baby-sit.
Ramos's life is a Forrest Gumpian odyssey, most of it verifiable. His claim about being a well-known dance instructor in New York City leads to his quotations in a New York Times article from 1971 on the latest crazes. A mention of his stumble into modeling leads to a full-page magazine advertisement for Playboy, with a 30-year-old Ramos relaxing next to a beautiful woman in the mid-1960s. ("What sort of man reads Playboy?" the copy begins. "A guy who enjoys life thickly carpeted.")
Ramos enjoyed life, all right, through six marriages, fortunes and bankruptcies, and, after he turned 70, a pile of world records for weight lifting.
But long before any of that was a photo in the 1952 yearbook of North Phoenix High in which he is winning a dance contest with his girlfriend, Barbara Thomason, later known as Carolyn Mitchell, an actress who had a role in Jack Nicholson's first movie (1958's "The Cry Baby Killer"), became Mickey Rooney's fifth wife and was murdered in 1966.
A former dance instructor, Ramos spent 20 years working for Arthur Murray Dance Studios, eventually managing studios across the Northeast.
"If I could do anything in the world, I would give away all my weight-lifting medals if I could be on 'Dancing with the Stars,' " Ramos said. "I've always just wanted to dance."
He befriended another Arthur Murray instructor, Sidney Craig, who later started a weight-loss company named for his wife, Jenny.
The Craigs became neighbors in the San Diego area as Ramos started a chain of women's health clubs before going bankrupt. That led Ramos to open five World Gym locations — explaining the photograph taken with Arnold Schwarzenegger — after he moved to Colorado Springs in 1993 to be closer to the United States Olympic Center so he could pursue his latest infatuation, weight lifting.
Ah, yes. Weight lifting. With Ramos, it is easy to become sidetracked.
In the one-bedroom condominium that he shares with his 12-year-old dog, Avi, Ramos unlocked a drawer to reveal a trove of weight-lifting medals won over the last two decades.
Weight lifting was merely a retirement hobby. Ramos is about 5 feet 9 inches and 185 pounds, his muscles partly disguised under a T-shirt and shorts.
"I have to admit, I have an extraordinary body," Ramos said. "Not for an 80-year-old. But for a 30-year-old."
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