Brian Cage is done letting people guess.
The AEW star told The Smooth Vega Podcast that he has used performance-enhancing drugs, and that he would rather say so than have it treated as an accusation.
I don’t care. I want to be more and more open about this. Everybody goes, ‘Oh, you just take steroids.’ Listen, if you just did a one-shot cycle, like I call it, like Captain America, guess what? Gyms wouldn’t exist and everyone would be on steroids. Do steroids work? Absolutely. Have I taken PEDs? Absolutely. I’ve never said I haven’t.
His argument is that it explains less than people assume.
Are PEDs what got me to where I am? Absolutely not. When people say like, ‘Oh, I’m so gassed up at my return,’ I’ve only been on TRT forever now. I’m 42 years old. The amount of people that take stuff is wild. I’ll just say this, there’s a lot more people, not just in wrestling, but everywhere that take stuff than don’t take stuff.
He says the first time came after his first bodybuilding show, at a coach’s encouragement, having held off for years partly because of what he had heard about roid rage. He does not believe in that either, comparing it to people who use being drunk as cover for behaviour they were capable of anyway.
Cage also argues the health risks are overstated relative to alcohol and other drugs. That part is worth treating carefully. Long-term anabolic steroid use is associated with cardiovascular disease, liver damage and hormonal disruption, and the research on it is a good deal less settled than either side of the argument tends to allow.
The conversation moved to Chris Benoit, who killed his wife Nancy and their seven-year-old son Daniel before taking his own life in 2007. Cage said he never accepted steroids as the explanation, and that a three-day, planned sequence does not fit the roid rage idea.
The medical record is genuinely unsettled. Benoit’s brain was examined in 2007 and found to have severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy, with one researcher describing it as the most damaged brain they had examined. Those doctors said steroids do not cause the protein deposits behind CTE. Another neurologist countered that CTE-related violence tends to be impulsive rather than planned, and pointed instead to the testosterone in Benoit’s system, which testing put at roughly ten times a normal level.
Cage made a broader point about that era, arguing steroids get blamed for deaths in which drinking, painkillers and other drugs were also involved.
He last wrestled on the September 5 Collision, teaming with fellow Don Callis Family member Jake Doyle in a loss to The Young Bucks.
