Sydney is awash with illegal performance-enhancing drugs which are being stockpiled for the Olympic Games, according to an Australian newspaper yesterday. The Sunday Telegraph said a journalist approached dealers at an inner-city gym with a shopping list and walked away with £500 of banned anabolic steroids. The journalist was assured that more drugs could be bought just as easily.

The lucrative trade, the paper said, was bolstered by a complex operation with bogus Australian firms using licences to export animal steroids to countries such as Mexico and recycling them back to the black market.

The paper said inner-city gymnasiums were hotbeds for dealers in the illegal steroid trade and claimed that bio-hazard containers (for the safe disposal of syringes) in the men's and women's toilets were overflowing.

The Telegraph said it easily placed two orders for the anabolic steroid Deca-50 (nandrolene decanoate) and clenbuterol and picked them up three days later.

"They've plugged a few holes but it's just overflowed into other areas," one distributor was quoted as saying. "It's getting harder to get your hands on human steroids but it doesn't matter as there's heaps of good quality animal stuff out there. If there's a problem it'll be trying to fill the demand."