Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum, Thal Near Graz, Austria

Steroid use
Schwarzenegger has admitted to using performance-enhancing anabolic steroids while they were legal, writing in 1977 that "steroids were helpful to me in maintaining muscle size while on a strict diet in preparation for a contest. I did not use them for muscle growth, but rather for muscle maintenance when cutting up." He has called the drugs "tissue building."
In 1999, Schwarzenegger sued Dr. Willi Heepe, a German doctor who publicly predicted his early death on the basis a link between steroid use and later heart problems. As the doctor had never examined him personally, Schwarzenegger collected a US$10,000 libel judgment against him in a German court. In 1999, Schwarzenegger also sued and settled with The Globe, a U.S. tabloid which had made similar predictions about the bodybuilder's future health. Schwarzenegger was born with a bicuspid aortic valve, an aortic valve with only two leaflets (a normal aortic valve has three leaflets). As late as 1996, a year before Schwarzenegger's open heart surgery to replace this aortic valve with a human homograft valve, Schwarzenegger publicly defended his use anabolic steroids during his bodybuilding career.