Steroids In Sports

Steroids are a hot topic of debate and controversy in the world of athletes and sports. Steroids fall under the umbrella of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and are a dark cloud that have been hovering over the sports world for a long time. In the world today, steroids are the most relevant in major league baseball. Many baseball players, such as Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, and Mark McGwire, just to name a few, have ruined their reputations because of steroids. There are repercussions for PED use in major league baseball, which have cut down on the substance abuse by players but have nowhere near eliminated the problem.

President George W. Bush says “Steroids are dangerous in sports and steroids send the wrong message: There are shortcuts to accomplishments and performance is more important than character.”

Steroid abuse has become a huge problem in professional sports today. Athletes are now using steroids to gain a competitive edge over their opponents. Also, the athletes are using the steroids to recover quickly from major injuries or surgeries. Many former superstar athletes have been caught taking steroids during the season and offseason.

Athletes use performance enhancing drugs to boost their game. The professionals who use these drugs are ruining the integrity of the game. Many people don’t understand why professional athletes would go to such extreme measures to be better when they have already proven themselves. Athletes are just taking away from their natural ability by using these dangerous drugs. The risk of using performance enhancing drugs is a lot greater than the reward, because an athlete’s reputation could be tarnished and their career ruined. Money is one of the major reasons why players use them; if they perform at levels higher than what their natural abilities could do they will be offered a large sum of money.

?When late football player Lyle Alzado contended in 1991 that anabolic steroid abuse caused his inoperable brain lymphoma, which ultimately killed the retired football player?? (Denham 63) Yet athletes continue to disregard warnings of the harmful affects and persist on abusing the illegal substances. I think Barry Bonds current injuries can be blamed on his use of designer steroids. This just goes to show that he had his time to shine in breaking many professional baseball records but now he is paying the price for the abuse of steroids. The journal of the American Medical Association has tested many illegal steroids and has found that they give you mass results like all athletes look for in using steroids; however steroids do cause adverse effects such as breast enlargement, heart disease, and cancer. (Denham 64) A group of athletic trainers were brought together and began a 6 to 18 week study of the affects of steroids on several athletes; at the end of the study they came up with result of massive gains in strength but there were signs of cardiovascular disease developing in most of the athletes. (Hartgens 5) Most athletes have knowledge of these side effects. Nearly all the side effects are printed on every bottle of illegal substances athletes buy, yet they continue to abuse steroids. Athletes know of these effects but they continue to use steroids, they get the results in strength that they are looking for but eventually all

From the beginning of history, professional and amateur athletes have tempted to use legal or illegal drugs to enhance their performance (1). Athletes have used pharmacological agents, called Performance-enhancing drugs(PEDs), to enhance performance or to become leaner or more muscular (2). In sports, administration of drugs that are forbidden by international world anti-doping agency (WADA) is referred as doping (3). Anabolic androgenic agents (AASs) are the most popular agents that are abused by the athletes, especially bodybuilding athletes. Besides these agents, other classes of drugs such as stimulants and peptide hormones (growth hormone and insulin) are new PEDs that are abused by a lot of athletes in the different sports (1). Other than these compounds, athletes often use dietary supplements like creatine, protein, and vitamins to enhance strength and increase body mass (4-6).

Abstract:  With the increase of competition has also come the need to become bigger and stronger than the opponent.  The use of steroids among athletes has caused the focus of the game to change.  No longer does an athlete want to win by doing their best, but they want to become bigger and have an advantage over the opponent.  Ultimately, all athletes feel that they need to use performance-enhancing drugs to compete at the same level. Despite all of the warnings and information on performance-enhancing drugs, athletes continue to use them and overlook the potential health risks associated with steroids.

Hard hits are hit every day in baseball and sometimes even homeruns, but do you ever think about how hitters are even able to hit that hard? Sometimes people work very hard to be able to hit hard, or some people take drugs such as steroids to get them where they are today. Steroids is a drug that contains many hormones, alkaloids, and vitamins, which make people a lot stronger. A former Oakland Athletics player Mark McGwire used steroids in MLB to help him be a strong hitter and thrower. People do use steroids in other sports, maybe such as football, soccer, and track, but is it really fair to others if someone else uses it to make them stronger? To play a fair game of baseball, steroids should not be involved.

A Poll by the Press in ’04 says that sixty-one percent of eight hundred and sixty-five people surveyed that all the athletes in baseball that were tested for steroids and shown positive should have been banned from the game. In the year 2005 it was discovered that two out of three people agreed with banning the players who made it to the Hall of Fame but tested positive for steroids. Most if not all people consider this action cheating and frown upon its use. How could this be? In today’s readings of sports articles and papers, fans tend to think that steroids give other players an unfair advantage. This response branches out from the false accusations that the professionals have a kind of special ability or talent which isn’t based on their state of being. What makes steroids different from other enhancing products is that the effects that come with taking them are a little more severe and that the result for muscle and strength production is a lot greater than the other products that are out in the market. This assumption, and the stereotypical muscle head body that comes with it, makes a fan or spectator of the game think about Calvinism, the belief that ingesting any kind of pill or product for any reason at all is bad and looked down on, and leads to the social aspect of the world to call these people aliens or fakes, which happen to be the main points that really keep steroids out of the Majors.

No parent should have to bury their teenage son or daughter before them, especially because of a drug overdose. Sadly, this has happened to many families including the parents of Taylor Hooton, 17-year old high school athlete who lived in Plato, Texas. Hooton was a very popular student-athlete who was in his senior year of high school. In the spring Taylor would leave his mark during the baseball season. Sadly, his life ended shortly, Taylor hung himself a month after his birthday because he was dealing with depression from his excessive steroid use. Brian reports not long after Taylor’s death NIDA noticed a sharp increase in the use of steroids among male teens in the late 1990s (Monitoring the Future Survey 2008). This story is an example of how extreme situations like this can be. A story such as this one is more shocking to hear than one of a professional getting caught up in a publicized drug scandal. Even though these drugs may be helpful for the time being, enhancing the entertainment, it also weakens the values of sportsmanship and the love for the game.

The use of steroids in athletics harms the quality of the sport by allowing certain athletes to have a competitive advantage, it harms the body, and ruins historic records of the sport that the athletes cheat in. Athletes using steroids are given a performance advantage that allows them to be bigger, faster, and stronger (Logos). The historic records being made by steroid infused athletes harm sports because the records created were not from set fairly (Ethos). The use of steroids in sports allows athletes to bypass physical training by taking a steroid which is competitively is unfair to athletes who spend months training for their sport (Pathos).

For many years, the use and abuse of anabolic-androgenic steroids have been linked closely to athletes. Steroids come in different forms. They can be taken in pill form or injected straight into the user’s muscles by a needle. There are many sports that are associated with steroid abuse like weightlifting, basketball, and track and field.

My major is kinesiology. The topic I chose to commit to is whether steroids should be legalized or stay illegal. I chose this topic because it is an ongoing issue happening today with athletes and it has been an issue for a long time. The topic of steroids in sport has had much controversy as said by a couple of my kinesiology professors during their

Steroids as shown by the evidence causes increase in the muscle mass of some players without the need to work out. Athletes that are playing in professional sports are playing a game they love to play. However, athletes have a job that they need to do. If athletes underperform or do not reach desire production, they will be released which means that they will not make money. In a poll discussed by Feinberg revealed that “98% of Olympic athletes would take illegal performance enhancing drugs if it would guarantee victory”, (Feinberg 462). This statistic correlates with baseball players because of that desire to win and success has make cheating a normal concept in sports. The idea of athletes cheating to be able to maintain success also is

According to Dr. Charles E. Yesalis, a professor health and human development at Penn St. University, "drug use among athletes has gone dramatically up in recent years. Athletes also are becoming more venturesome about mixing different types of drugs. One reason is that new drugs keep coming on the market, and some turn out to be of help in giving athletes a competitive edge. Sports officials feel they have no choice but to try to combat drug use in sports with every legitimate weapon at their command. They are motivated in part by concern for athletes' well being. Most performance-enhancing agents have side effects that can pose an immediate or long-range threat to health. But the officials are driven by self-interest too. If the public perceive major sports to be hopelessly drug-ridden, attendance and television viewership is likely to plummet. And thatcould lead to financial ruin for athletes and promoters alike. The monetary stakes are higher today than ever before. Many of the top athletes damned very high salaries, and a select few demand huge additional sums for product endorsement. Pro team owners, meanwhile, are constantly scrambling for more income from broadcasting and other sources to meet their massive payrolls and still turn a profit. A series of drug scandals might well cause media outlets and corporate sponsors