I stumbled across an interview with Dorian Yates — it takes some odd turns, by the way — where he briefly mentions how he started using “gear” right before his first competition — where he blew everyone away:
It was 1985. I was 23 years old and had decided to enter my first competition after a year and a half of training, in which I had made excellent progress. I knew the others who would be competing would be using gear, and I wanted to even the playing field. It was a very deliberate decision that I didn’t take lightly, and I did as much reading as I could first. At 23, I feel I was old enough. At that age, you are fully matured physically, you’ve reached your full adult height, and so on. Even though I hadn’t been training terribly long, I had already managed to develop my physique to a decent level.
Looking back, I may have been able to win that contest without using anything. I did one six-week “building” cycle of 20 milligrams of Dianabol a day, which took me from 215 at 5’11” to 235. Those were the most dramatic results I ever saw from steroids. I took six weeks off the gear, then at eight weeks out from my contest I began using 15 milligrams of Anavar per day, as well as one shot of Primobolan a week, which was 200 milligrams.
I competed at around 210-215 and won that contest. EFBB [Britain’s equivalent of the NPC] officials were there and convinced me to represent the United Kingdom the following weekend as our heavyweight at the IFBB World Games. I placed seventh, and competed with men like Berry de Mey and Matt Mendenhall, both of whom were the top amateur heavyweights in their respective nations at that time.
I suppose Dorian was a natural, even if he wasn’t natural.