{"id":13892,"date":"2026-02-15T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldbodybuildingnews.com\/?p=13892"},"modified":"2026-02-15T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T12:00:00","slug":"i-thought-my-powerlifter-father-was-the-strongest-man-in-the-world-but-a-secret-steroid-addiction-took-him-and-us-to-the-brink-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldbodybuildingnews.com\/?p=13892","title":{"rendered":"I thought my powerlifter father was the strongest man in the world. But a secret steroid addiction took him \u2013 and us \u2013 to the brink | Family"},"content":{"rendered":"


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W<\/span>hen I tell people that a drug addiction nearly killed my dad, I know what most of them are thinking. Heroin. Crack. Maybe meth or ket. Those substances that steal your soul and slowly wreak havoc on your body. They\u2019re imagining Trainspotting; too-skinny frames and protruding hip bones, the physical effects of addiction that are impossible to miss.<\/p>\n

But that isn\u2019t how it played out in my family.<\/p>\n

I was 13 years old when my parents\u2019 marriage fell apart, disintegrating suddenly and seemingly without warning over a few grey November weeks. When I tell people that my mum, my brother and I had no idea my dad was addicted to drugs until after he left us, I can see the bewilderment in their eyes. How could you not have noticed<\/em>? I ask myself the same question all the time.<\/p>\n

My dad\u2019s drug addiction didn\u2019t ravage his body. Instead, it built it. As a 17st 7lb powerlifter, he looked to my childhood eyes like something of an adonis. Friends fancied him. Boys in my class coveted his physique. There was never any question of \u201cmy dad\u2019s harder than your dad\u201d in my school playground. It was always my dad. And I loved him for it. Dad rarely drank alcohol and ate unfathomable quantities of protein and carbs. He\u00a0went to the gym several times a week, a habit he had held on to, obsessively, since he was 15 years old. My mum jokes that he even skipped his own stag do to fit in an extra session.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Arthur White at his childhood home in Essex, mid-1960s.<\/span> Photograph: courtesy of Emma Fowle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Born six years after the end of the second world war, my dad grew up on a council estate in Essex after his family were relocated from London\u2019s bomb\u2011battered East End. Theirs was an ordinary, working-class household. Four kids. Formica table. A budgie in a\u00a0cage on the sideboard. They were poor, but happy. Like many successful sportspeople, Dad was something of a\u00a0teenage polymath. He played semi-professional football for Leyton FC and broke the schoolboy sprint record in his last year of secondary school. But weight training was the thing that truly captured his imagination.<\/p>\n

In the mid-60s, my dad was a skinny kid with a shaved head who knocked around the estate in bovver boots and bleached Levi\u2019s. By the time I was born 10 years later, he was unrecognisable. In 1977, Dad competed in his first British championships and Mum went into labour with me halfway through the presentation ceremony. Perhaps we should have known then that family life would always be overshadowed by lifting. Not even the day of my birth belonged to me alone.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>White training at Bethnal Green gym in the late 70s. <\/span> Photograph: courtesy of Emma Fowle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A decade later, in 1988, he won his first world championships. He was 37 years old. We welcomed him home with banners that spanned the width of our house and articles in the local newspaper. He won Essex Sports Personality of the Year.<\/p>\n

Two years later, he went to work one day \u2013 and didn\u2019t come back.<\/p>\n

Until that November in 1990, my parents \u2013 who had met at 14 and married at 19 \u2013 had seemed ridiculously happy. We were a close family, and alongside his weightlifting career my dad had spent the 80s building a successful construction business. With a villa in Spain and a brand-new red Escort XR3i on the driveway, we looked as if we had it all together. Then it fell spectacularly apart.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>White with Fowle\u2019s mother Jacqui on their wedding day in 1971.<\/span> Photograph: courtesy of Emma Fowle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shortly before he left, Dad sat me down and told me he was having an affair. I was 13, and felt as if the bottom had fallen out of my world. Then, despite promising me that he would not leave, he did just that. His abandonment came weeks before we were due to move house and was just the first in a long line of catastrophic betrayals that my mum would uncover in the coming months. First was finding out that he had gone to South Africa with the woman he\u2019d promised he was no longer shagging. Second was that he had taken \u00a335,000 in cash from the sale of our house. Two weeks later, after paying cash for a flat in Cape Town and burning through the rest in an extended drugs binge, he returned without a penny. He walked through the airport with only the clothes on his back, begged my mum to take him back, and confessed that he had become addicted to steroids and cocaine. To say that my mum was shocked is the understatement of the century. She knew that he had taken steroids on occasions, but she had no idea about the extent of his dependency. It quickly became clear.<\/p>\n

Sometime in the mid-80s, Dad had sustained an injury. A bloke at the gym offered him something to speed up his recovery; he was reticent, but nearly everyone was doing it. The dangers didn\u2019t register or, perhaps, like most, he simply chose to ignore them.<\/p>\n