Zelím Nel

In 1980 Muhammad Ali was 38, three stone over his fighting weight and booked to fight Larry Holmes for the heavyweight title, so a doctor put him on thyroid hormone to burn the weight off, and Sylvester Stallone, ringside, said what followed was like watching an autopsy on a man who was still alive. Ali had retired in 1979. The money brought him back. He came into camp at around 253 pounds and the weight came off too slowly, so a Chicago physician, Dr Charles Williams, diagnosed an underactive thyroid and prescribed Thyrolar, a thyroid hormone drug, at one tablet a day. Thyroid hormone sets the speed of the body's engine. Take it when your own gland is working and the engine runs into the red: the heart races, the body overheats, and it burns muscle along with the fat. Ali, by his own account, doubled the dose, because he thought the pills were like vitamins. He weighed in at 217 and a half pounds, his lightest since he beat Foreman in 1974, and the newspapers said he looked like the Ali of Zaire. He said later he was too weak, and did not feel like dancing. On 2 October 1980, at Caesars Palace, he could barely throw a punch. Holmes, who had been his sparring partner and idolised him, hit him for ten rounds and kept looking at the referee to stop it. Angelo Dundee finally pulled him out after the tenth. In 61 professional fights it was the only time Ali was stopped. When doctors at UCLA examined him afterwards, they found what nobody had checked: before the pills, his thyroid had been working normally. Williams himself later acknowledged that the drug had left Ali overheating in the ring, tipping into heat exhaustion. His longtime fight doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, had already walked away over the damage to his brain. Four years later Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome. The greatest heavyweight who ever lived was taken apart that night by a weight-loss drug, prescribed by a man with a pad and no reason to say no. His own gland had been working perfectly. The only thing wrong with him that autumn was in the pill bottle.