A few days ago, while I was working at the computer, I remembered one of the Karate champions, Andy Hug. I have been doing Karate for many years in the past. It is more than ten years that I have abandoned it because I didn’t have time. I loved some of the Karate champions and Andy Hug was the top ranked one. While I was checking the web pages and enjoying the Andy’s videos, a sentence attracted my attention: Andy passed away on August 2000.
I felt so sorry for him and thought he was passed away because of an accident or 
something like that but when I read he died because of leukemia, I was really shocked. I could not believe that it is possible that such a strong champion to be defeated by leukemia. Leukemia has different kinds but when I read that it took only a few days from the day that he was diagnosed with leukemia and the day that he passed away, I became dead shocked and I could not do anything for a few hours. What a fulminant disease! 
I made more researches over the web and found out that some people believe that Andy was on steroids. I really do not know and could not find anything to confirms this idea but with all due respect to Andy Hug, I think it can be true because leukemia in such a healthy champion should be triggered and intensified by something unusual. There a lot of ordinary people involved in different kinds of leukemia but many of them can survive. So why shouldn’t such a strong man be able to survive and dies so fast and easy?
Anyway, it can be true or false and I am not going to judge about Andy. He is too big to be accused for these things but I told you about the storm I had in my mind after I read that news. He was died in 2000 and I did not know.
Let’s see if it is really possible that athletes die because of doping. Doping has become so usual in sports because athletes love to win and defeat their competitors but does it really worth?
I know two different kinds of doping very well but there are some other kinds too. One of them is called blood doping that can be so dangerous and cause immediate heart arrest and death. In this kind of doping, they remove some blood from the athlete a few days before the competition, condense the red blood cells and enrich them with loads of oxygen and then this blood will be injected to him/her few minutes or hours before the race. This amount of blood which is enriched with oxygen can create an extraordinary energy in the athlete. Although I think this kind of doping can not cause blood cancer but it is so dangerous because it imposes a fatal pressure on heart and lungs and other organs.
Another kind of doping is done mostly by anabolic steroids that act like the steroid hormone, testosterone: Nandrolone, tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), stanozolol, androstenedione, DHEA.
This kind of doping doesn’t have any instant effect but it works in long term and intensifies muscle production for the athletes. We all have steroids in our body but they are at the normal level which is necessary for the normal body functions but extra amount of these materials can cause serious problems. I have already mentioned in two of my other articles that steroids can intensify the growth and propagation of tumor cells but it seems higher levels of these materials can cause cancer and specially blood cancer, leukemia.
I researched to find the side effects of the anabolic agents. There are some side effects like kidney damage, development of breasts, premature baldness, shrinking and hardening of testicles, sterility and impotence, acne, increased aggression and sexual appetite in men and development of male features, including facial hair, deepening of the voice, irregular periods, increased aggression in women. I have not been able to find anything related to doping and blood cancer or even any other kind of cancer but I am sure one day it will be announced that anabolic agents can cause cancer.
There are some other kinds of doping. Fortunately all kinds of doping are seriously banned in sports and athletics and there are a lot of doping control and testing to find the violating athletes. There are penalties for doping and all the athletes know this but many of them still do it. It can help the athletes to win sometimes but it causes them to lose many things: their health, beauty, credit and reputation if they get caught and finally their life.
I wish Andy was still alive. May he rest in peace, Amen!
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This is a very informative and useful article for me.This post is very useful for me. This would help me to tell some important caution about cancer.
Thank you very much..
Chemotherapy killed Andy Hug!!!
You are a true piece of shit! Pardon my language, but you deserve worse. You call yourself a fan of this great champion and then shame him in death! You have no substantial evidence to back up your foolish speculation; it is also clear from your writing that you have no clear understanding of biology. You are a true Wikipedia scientist, congratulations! For every person whom beats leukemia and survives, many more will not be so lucky. Good health and a strong body only help in the battle against cancer, and hardly at that! It just buys you more time as the cancer eats away at your body. There is no reason to say that Mr. Hug should not have succumbed to cancer because of his athleticism, and then jump to steroids as the only logical explanation for his demise. You are a lowly being and a scoundrel, in the future be more aware of the power of your words.
sincerely,
Benjamin J. ZAOUI
p.s. I’m not surprised you gave up the art of Karate, you don’t think every other karate practitioner is pressed for time?
BTW there is STRICTLY no data from scientific research performed on the effects of steroids showing that they have adverse effects on health. i.e.: that steroids are carcinogens, etc. Do your research “healthoma”
If you read andy’s book, you will now that andy was a spiritual man, he did tai chi and meditated. Andy isn’t the person that cheats on his fans. Also, he worked out since he was 15 hence the muscular body.
Did you know his last fight was with Nobu hayashi wish also diagnosed leukemia recently?
You dont know andy, andy would never resort to sutch shamefull things.
may God have mercy upon his soul.
I think if you use your fucking brain and actually read some “REAL” articles not shit made up by morons such as your self, that you will see that steroids are in fact BAD for you and do cause problems. Why do you think they are banned you bafoon.
Well… Andy Hug was in Hungary in 1987 a year after the Chernobyl accident. This region of Europe had contaminated soil. Who’s to say he didn’t eat one too many mushrooms from there? And who’s to say he didn’t spend a lot of time in eastern europe? If he was eating healthy, that means a lot of veggies, he probably ingested more becquerels per kg than most people… and living in Japan later, with the high dioxin levels, he could very well have had a high concentration of toxins ranging from mercury to dioxin etc…
Actually every time when such a great player dies so young its impossible not to attract attention
First nobody even want to discuss widely open the cause of death and to the people everything start to sounds like the cover up and conspiracy theories
The such cute form of aggressive leukemia is not very likely to be triggered by Steroids mainly because steroids take an important support role in every chemo therapy They use them for boosting the effects and usefulness of the chemo on the first place.
You got the very good point that something extraordinary happens which create the base for development of a suck aggressive acute leukemia .
It can be a environmental toxin ,radiation poisoning , the list of common causes of leukemia is long .
From this point everything is gonna be just speculation and i doubt even the possibility the immediate response team which take care of Andy battling the decease even they may not know what was really going on until gets too late .After all the immunology is a base for every single decease .
Most of the deceases involved in immune sells are very much fatal in the current state of our science and tech .
One thing i clearly can tell is that something really gets wrong with his white blood cells or bone marrow -the source creating them
The possible risk factors for leukemia include being male, being white, previous chemotherapy treatment, exposure to radiation, and for adults, being older than 70.
so I would not ignore the radiation poisoning as well
The acuteness of his decease and the aggressiveness really Battle s me especially when not too long ago KGB used the radioactive poisoning agents on Litvinenko – their own agent so I don’t want to speculate but guess the Swish and Japan PD s should a create wide range investigation without ignoring the wide range of possibilities because mainly he was a great real star on the top of the hill
Gets very suspicious when something like this happens .
In my line of work there s very little probability of co incidents
good……..helped me do my project.thanks whoever you are!
I think you all need to just relax! Yes, the dude who wrote this article missed his target but, look at some of the gammer throughout? Some people just do not express their feeling well. The fact a person dies of any illness is tragic, regardless of athletic ability. There is always cause and effect. Whether a persons illness is brought on by genetics, environment, or simple substance abuse it is still tragic! I don’t even know who Mr. Hug but, I am certain it doesn’t matter whether he used steroids or any other performance enhancers. The man is dead and it is no ones right to speak ill of the dead! What about the millions of people who have lost their lives over the years to this illness? Many of these people were athletes, and many were NOT! Were they all on performance enhancers? Let stick to the facts, I am 230 lbs, 6 “1″ and I have approximately 9% body fat! I run 5 days per week and I have always been bigger than average. I NEVER touched a steroid in my life. Some people are simply genetically predisposed to muscular athletic builds. My father was the same way, when was 62 years old he would work out bench pressing 350 lbs. He was 6 feet, and 195 lbs. He died of Liver cancer, and he never touched a steroid until he started Radiation, and Chemotherapy.
My point is, everyone is asking the correct question. (WHY) but, we are all looking in the wrong places for our answers. Also, I hardly this you meant it like you said it but, by saying Mr. Hug died of a illness due to lingering side effects of drugs he intentionally ingested you are in-fact saying- HE DID IT TO HIMSELF! Which is why you are getting so much hostility from some of these individuals.
Cheers
Mr.JP
Thanks for sharing, I too notice the other writer writing and misspelling. I am not a grammar profession and notice these things lol. Anyway I appreciate what you were saying about Andi Hug, he was a great inspiration to us(martial art expert) all.
Martin
Martial Art Expert
A lot of comments regarding this article come from individuals who are such die-hard fans of Andy Hug, that they think anything other than praise of the man is out of bounds. Look, I have been around both martial artists and bodybuilders since the late fifties, and the fact that Andy was struck down by Leukemia at the peak of his career is a legitimate red flag. All the author was trying to say in the article was that IF Andy might have been a “user” of performance enhancing drugs, he was putting himself on pretty shaky ground. Things like Leukemia, Lou Gehrigs Disease, Pancreatic Cancer, and other metatastic cancers and diseases DO pop up in alarmingly high rates among athletes. I personally known performance enhancing drug users who were boxers, martial artists, weightlifters, and bodybuilders who were afflicted by those diseases despite their not having any family history or exposure to those diseases. Yeah, normal people die from those diseases, but not in numbers equal to athletes. That is a fact. The author did not say definitively that Andy used anything…he just posited a query. In this day and age where athletes will do or take ANYTHING in order to mount the winners podium, articles like this are necessary so that hopefully a few athletes will have the knowledge and commonsense needed to AVOID performance enhancing drugs at all costs. If you think martial artists are above all that, I suggest you take note of all the competitors at tournaments who openly slug down so-called “energy drinks” as the tournament goes on. I certainly hope that Andy Hug did not die from any sort of drug use, but to know and understand the possibility does not detract from his greatness. It just makes me wish that there were no diseases and/or drugs around that could take someone like him and others away from all of us who followed and admired him. Osu!