Steroids ‘killed Tait’

Press, 11 May 1989, Page 48

Steroids ‘killed Tait’

PA Wellington A former Canadian shot putter has claimed the twice Commonwealth Games medallist, Aucklander Robin Tait, died as a result of using steroids. Bruce Pirnie, a secondary school physical education teacher, made the claims while giving evidence at the Canadian inquiry into drug use in sport, according to a Radio New Zealand report yesterday.

Pirnie said he was a heavy user of anabolic steroids throughout the 19705, but was now campaigning against them

because of what happened to Tait. Tait and Pirnie first met in competition at the 1972 Munich Olympics. “Tait was already known, at this stage, as the doctor, because of the amount of medication he carried,” Pirnie said. Tait died of pancreatic cancer in 1985. “He died very painfully and the word out at the time, and I don’t recall if I saw it in print and even then it would be second or third hand, was that the autopsy showed drug abuse was one of the major causes of the cancer,” Pirnie

Pirnie added during the Toronto inquiry that he had to think hard to name one thrower he knows of who is drug free. Besides Tait, Pirnie recalled an American athlete who lost a testicle to cancer, which was also linked to steroid use.

In a career that extended more than 20 years Tait attended six Commonwealth Games and two Olympics, winning a bronze medal in the discus at the 1966 Jamaica Commonwealth Games, and gold in the same event at the 1974 Christchurch Games.