Labeled a Cheat, but He Has a Story

A Full Life, Marred Late: For Don Ramos a former

dance instructor and model and neighbor to Sidney
Craig weight lifting was merely a retirement hobby.
Recently, though, he was declared a cheat.

By JOHN BRANCH
Published: September 15, 2013

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, Ramoss 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.
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.
Ive 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.
Ramoss life is a Forrest Gumpian odyssey, most of it verifiable. Ramos enjoyed life, all right, through six
marriages, fortunes and bankruptcies, and, after he turned 70, a pile of world records for weight lifting.
The Craigs became neighbors in the San Diego area as Ramos started a chain of womens 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.
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.

He can run and jump. (He wants to set high-jump records for his age but cannot figure out where to practice.)
His face barely sags. His hair, in the mold of Joe Bidens, is thin, white and combed straight back. He has no
hearing aid and, thanks to eye surgery, no glasses. His resonant voice could do voice-overs.
His mind is quick. He drives fast. He covets younger women; his last serious girlfriend, when he was 66, was 33.
Spend a day with him, and you could be convinced if someone said he was 58.
But all that, and all those stories, is overshadowed by what happened in June in Chicago, at the Pan American
Masters Weightlifting Championships.
For his weight class, Ramos nearly broke the 80-and-over record of about 133 pounds in the snatch, in which
competitors lift the bar overhead from the floor in a single motion. It might have been a surprise that he did not
set a record: Ramos still holds world records for the snatch in three weight categories in the 75-79 age group.
He snatched 172 pounds in 2008.
But in the clean and jerk, in which the bar is raised first to the shoulders and then overhead, Ramos broke the
record by lifting about 161 pounds.
Ramos was immediately escorted to drug testing. It is done at international events, sparingly, mostly to
authenticate records and weed out the occasional steroid suspects. Organizers are often ambivalent about drug
testing; it legitimizes the event, but at some cost. The director of the Pan American event, Corinne Grotenhuis,
paid $6,000 for Usadas oversight, she said.
Ramos was watched closely as he urinated into a container and sealed it. He had been through the procedure
many times and worried little about the results. He accepted his medal and a Grand Master award, for the best
weight lifter among the 200-plus competitors. There was no prize money. There rarely is.
Then Ramos went home, alone, to his dog.
About a month later, he received a notice from Usada: he had failed the drug test. An out-of-balance ratio of
testosterone to epitestosterone, a related hormone in the body, gave him away.
Ramoss doctor ordered a blood test. His testosterone level on July 29 was 1,121 nanograms per deciliter
more than twice what it should have been. Ramos stopped the injections.
A month later, a follow-up blood test found his testosterone level to be extraordinarily low, signaling a range of
potential problems, affecting anything from the prostate to the pituitary glands.
Ramos said he never varied his doses and could not explain the spike, or the drop.
The average person thinks Im buying drugs in an alley, Ramos said. The stigma of getting caught taking
steroids most people say, Besides testosterone, what steroids did you take? They dont know that
testosterone is the steroid.
This week, a bottle of testosterone sat on Ramoss bathroom counter. He lifts weights five days a week but
worries that his gym will shun him. One man there approached Ramos and addressed him as the juicer,
Ramos said.
But Ramos vows to be back at international competitions in two years. By then, more world records may be out
of reach. By then, dozens, maybe hundreds, of little-known athletes like him will probably have been caught
and labeled cheaters, too.

The Internet Has Grown

Too Big for Its Aging
Infrastructure

BY ROBERT MCMILLAN
08.13.14 | 2:57 PM |

Yesterday, the 20,000 customers who use a Lansing Michigan web hosting company called Liquid Web
had some big internet problems. The reason: the internet grew too big for the memory chips in the
companys Cisco routers.
Think of it as the internets latest growing pain. Its a problem that networking geeks have seen coming
for awhile now, but yesterday it finally struck. And its likely to cause more problems in the next few
weeks. The bug doesnt seem to have affected core internet providerscompanies like AT&T and
Verizon, which haul vast quantities of data over the internets backbone, but certainly there are a
number of people that were caught by this, says Craig Labovitz, founder of network analysis company
Deepfield Networks.
The issue affects older, but widely used, routers such as the Cisco 7,600. These machines store routing
tables in their memorydirections describing the best way for packets of data to move to their ultimate
destinationbut some routers max out when their list of routes hits 512,000. Different routers have
different total routes in memory, but most of them have been closing in on the 500,000 level for a few
months now. Yesterday Verizon published an extra 15,000, kicking many routers over the 512,000
crash-point.
Verizon quickly withdrew most of these routes, kicking things back to normal, but some routers had
problems. Andree Toonk, a network engineer who runs a blog tracking networking issues says on a
typical day there are about 1,500 network outages on the internet. Yesterday, that number spiked to
2,587. Thats not enough to quality as a major problem, but its noticeable.
THE PROBLEM IS REAL, AND WE STILL HAVENT SEEN THE FULL EFFECTS.
Its not the first time this kind of thing has happened. Toonk says that there were similar memory
problems a few years back when the internet crossed over 256,000 addresses.
And Toonk and others predict that there could be more problems ahead, when we again cross that
magic 512,000 threshold. The problem is real, and we still havent seen the full effects, because most
of the Internet hasnt yet experienced the conditions that could cause problems for underprovisioned
equipment, wrote Jim Cowie, Chief Scientist at networking company Dyn, on his companys blog.
Still, theres a work-around out there. And yesterdays outage will put the issue front-and-center with
most networking staff, which means that the vast majority of the internet should be unaffected when
we finally hit 512,000 addresses for good.

The Internet Is Getting Too Big, And It's

Becoming A Problem For Some
Service Providers
If you've experienced problems with your internet connection recently, chances
are you're not alone.
Recent reports suggest the system that routers use to share the map of the
internet with one another has grown too large for some older routers to handle
which could result in poor connectivity.
The problem is, older routers can only process a certain number of routes
contained in this internet map. Routers share this map through what is referred
to asBorder Gateway Protocol routing tables, but when these routing tables grow too large
for a router's memory, that router can no longer properly handle internet traffic, as ZDNet
explains.
These older routers can only handle routing tables with 512,000 routes, and, as
Internet traffic management firm Dyn notes on its blog, the number of global
routes has recently reached that threshold. In other words, it seems as if the
number of routes within the map of the Internet has grown too large for older
routers to comprehend.
So what does this mean? Some Internet-based services may experience
disruptions. According to ZDNet, the North American Network Operators Group
on Tuesday said providers like AT&T, Comcast, Sprint, and Verizon have
experienced serious performance issues, which are expected to continue
throughout the next few weeks.
Sources from various internet service providers also confirmed to ZDNet that this
routing issue was indeed the cause of their recent service problems.
Dyn's Jim Finkle, however, says the situation "is more of an annoyance than a
real internet-wide threat." We're likely to experience sporadic outages over the
next few weeks while companies replace their hardware, but the internet isn't
coming to a crashing halt.

Want job, will travel:

five ways to help young
immigrants find work
Here are five approaches that
governments can use to help young
people use migration to access jobs
and develop skills
Michael Boampong in New York
Guardian Professional, Tuesday 12 August 2014 12.05 BST

While young people leave their country of birth for many different reasons, in many developing countries
one of the key drivers formigration is a lack of decent work. Roughly 27 million young people leave their
homelands to find employment abroad each year.
Does this trend suggest that migration may be a sustainable solution to the problem that 60% of young
people in developing regions are unemployed, not studying, or engaged in informal employment (pdf) ?
According to a number of heads of state and policymakers, the answer is yes. The government of
Malawi is a case in point. In 2013 they struck deals with a number of countries to "export" its youth
labour in an attempt to create new employment opportunities.
Of course, many migration experiences are far from smooth or positive. However, there are five
approaches that governments can take to help young people use migration as an effective means of
accessing job opportunities and developing their professional skills.
Create networks
Young migrants often lack access to trusted social support and professional networks. We need to work to
create virtual communities that connect newly arrived migrants with those who can offer assistance in the
form of advice, skills-training and mentorship in the destination country or society. Even before migrants
leave they can use these networks to access important information about employment opportunities.
Creating these social networks can help facilitate social and economic integration for young people in both
destination countries and when they return home to origin countries.
Equip young migrants with the right skills
Even in countries where the labour market is more buoyant, gaining employment is still competitive.
Before young people migrate for work, they should be equipped with relevant education and life skills
training. Appropriate education is key, but this could include also information about the job opportunities
and navigating the culture in the country they are planning to move to. Preparation will assist them in
taking advantage of employment opportunities in their destination country or society.
Encourage smooth remittance cash transfers
Remittances, sent from migrants back to their home countries, are a key source of income for
development. To optimise the development impact of diaspora youth, especially for local economic
development and as a means of stemming the tide of internal migration, it is important to support
mechanisms for remittance transfers. Governments in both destination and origin countries should
promote programmes that mobilise diaspora remittances and channel them into funding entrepreneurship
ideas in developing countries. Some good examples of this can be found in Paraguay and Honduras as part
of the MDG-F joint programmes (pdf) .
Invest in entrepreneurship

Young migrants can be agents of development, not only for their origin countries but destination countries
too. Partnerships between government and the private and third sector can help to ensure this this
opportunity isn't missed.
A good example of this is Italy's initiative supporting Ghanaian and Senegalese migrants through
the Migration for Development in Africa programme . The programme engages them in entrepreneurship
projects, provides non-financial services supporting the startup of small-to-medium enterprises and
encourages remittance transfer.
Support the return home
It is important not to forget what happens at the end of the journey for youth migrants. A survey showed
that 70% of African diaspora MBA students plan to return home after graduation. At the same time, 9 out
of 10 African doctoral candidates studying abroad plan to work in their country of origin.
This is a positive indicator for Africa's job creation, poverty reduction and economic growth. To capitalise
on this, governments need sound policies to facilitate student returns and foster integration at home.
Governments in Africa and other developing countries must be prepared to offer micro-finance and nonfinancial services to support enterprise startup by young returnees.
So is migration a silver bullet for youth unemployment? While many migrants do not have a positive
experience, labour migration can expose youth to better economic opportunities, particularly when they
are well supported at each stage of the process. However, there are limits to how far governments and
development practitioners should view youth labour migration and remittances as an alternative to
medium, or long-term, sustainable development. The growing number of youth labour migrants should
concern developing countries that want to use foreign employment to relieve labour market pressures at
home.

Guide dogs and guns: America's blind

gunmen
By William KremerBBC World Service

In the US, being blind is no bar to owning and carrying firearms. The blind people
who do it say they are simply exercising their constitutional right, and present no
danger to the public.
When Carey McWilliams went to the sheriff's office in Fargo, North Dakota, to fill out the
paperwork for a permit to carry a concealed weapon, the staff immediately noticed he was
holding the harness to a guide dog.
The woman behind the desk pointed out that he would have to pass a shooting test before
being granted the licence, but McWilliams said he knew that. He told her not to worry.
"So then she took a picture of me, and my application then went up through the ranks - it
got the signature of the chief of police of Fargo, the sheriff and the state attorney general's
office - and they kept calling me and calling me, saying: 'There's a shooting test, there's a
shooting test.'"
The day of the test came, and McWilliams duly went along to the police firing range with a
friend who was also trying for a permit. The targets were half-size cut-outs of assailants,
positioned seven yards (6.4m) away. McWilliams fired a series of shots with a .357
magnum, all of which landed in the heart region of his target.
Clearly, he knew what he was doing.
He had been into guns since he was 15, when, as an air force cadet, he went on a military
camp. The marine in charge of the shooting range had a brother who had lost his sight but
they still went hunting together, so he let McWilliams handle the M16 machine gun.

McWilliams, who before he lost his sight at the age of 10 had dreamed of joining the armed
services, was instantly hooked.
Three years later, he asked to enrol on a pistol marksmanship course run by the Reserve
Officer's Training Corps, the body that trains officers for the US armed forces. At that time
there was no requirement to be enlisted in the army to take the course, and after much
discussion, the instructor agreed to take him on. On the range, McWilliams learned to take
aim by listening to the sound of his target being wheeled back against the wall. It served
him very well. McWilliams says he shot better than two-thirds of his class, and in his final
exam scored 105 out of 100, with one bullet somehow ricocheting and passing through the
target twice.
He used the same technique in October 2000, in the police firing range in Fargo.
"The deputy sheriff said: 'Well, you have all these stickers here telling me that you're blind,
but you passed the test, so you got your permit. Expect a lot of grief because you're a test
case for the whole system, no-one's done this before.'"
Concealed carry permits - the licences required to carry a gun in public - are issued at
state level, and the criteria and rules vary across the US. While there is nothing in North
Dakota's statutes to prevent a blind person - or a person with any physical disability carrying a gun, in Florida, for example, a "physical inability to handle a firearm safely" is
listed as a reason for ineligibility. Yet even there, a blind person with a North Dakota
licence would still be able to carry his or her gun, since Florida recognises permits from
that state.
It's even more straightforward for blind people to own guns if they are content to leave
them at home. In most states, you don't need to perform a shooting test or get a licence to
buy a gun. Consequently, no-one knows how many blind Americans own guns for home
defence, target practice or hunting.
Carey McWilliams started hunting in 2008. When ducks fly across the sky, he says, they
make a sound like bicycle tyres on a pavement, and he traces them with the barrels of his
rifle. For other types of hunting, such as stalking elk, he goes out with a companion, who
whispers directions - up a bit, left a bit, right a bit - but who is not permitted to touch his
weapon.
Hunting in this way is not unskilled, says McWilliams. Ever the military enthusiast, he
argues that it is no different from how sniper teams work in a warzone, with a spotter giving
verbal directions to a marksman. At the moment he presses the trigger, the adrenaline
rush is huge. "You could probably lift up a car at that point. After you're done it's like
popping a balloon and you just get tired."