Actor Sylvester Stallone was summoned to appear in court in Sydney, Australia today on charges of smuggling 48 vials of human growth hormone (HGH) into the country. Ordinarily, this sort of thing wouldn’t have much of a place on a sports blog, but provided you haven’t been living under a rock the past three decades or so, you know that Stallone is a bit of a sports icon for his Academy Award-winning portrayal of Rocky Bolboa in Rocky.

Rocky has scrawny chicken-legs under his inflated torso. Who knew? (image courtesy of wnyt.com)

Stallone, 60 (not a typo), most recently portrayed Rocky in the surprise hit Rocky Balboa, the sixth installment of the franchise. The movie centers around a fiftysomething Rocky taking to the ring again to prove he’s the greatest of all time against a fighter some twenty years his junior. Now, I’m not going to comment on the quality of the picture, because I haven’t seen it. It was obvious, however, to anyone who’s seen so much as a promo for this movie that Stallone looked as inflated as the Bullwinkle balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I just thought you’d all like to know. We’re just not going to get away from the steroids controversy clean, are we, sports fans?  Even our fictional icons, our symbols for defying the odds and claiming victory on our own terms, are going down hard.