Professional sports have changed forever due to steroids and there is no going back in time.
Steroids have been headline news for some time in all levels of sports but most recently it started in the Major League Baseball as fall out from steroids became front line news in America.
Recent stars have come out of the wood work and admitted steroid use and some have paid a heavy price in doing so. Forever it has changed how athletes on all levels perform in the respective sport they play in. There are notes after athletes’ names that have broken records of past athletes and there are doubts that athletes have left due to the use of steroids.
The use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport is commonly referred to by the term “doping“, particularly by those organizations that regulate competitions. The use of performance enhancing drugs is mostly done to improve athletic performance. This is why many sports ban the use of performance enhancing drugs.
Major league baseball was the last major sports organization in the United States to implement a comprehensive drug testing policy. This all started with a bottle of a nutritional supplement seen in Mark McGwire´s locker. The bottle contained Androstendione, a prohormone, or a compound which can convert into another one inside the body. In this particular case, the compound in question converts to Testosterone once in the body. Unfortunately, at this time, McGwire was en route to breaking a home-run record that had been standing for decades. MGwire retired shortly after breaking that record, but the story of steroids in baseball and the Major League Baseball (MLB) organization went ahead at full speed. Just a few short years later, Ken Caminiti revealed to Sports Illustrated that he used anabolic steroids, and that he estimated roughly fifty percent of the players in the league were using them also. This admission opened the floodgates to the media to begin their full scale assault on MLB. Jose Canseco, in a book published during the height of the steroids in baseball media coverage, estimated that 85% of all players in MLB used steroids, and also admitted using them.
The steroid policy in football and the NFL as we know it began in 1987.
BY 2009, nearly 1 in 10 retired NFL players polled in a confidential survey said they had used now-banned anabolic steroids while still playing. According to the poll taken 16.3 percent of offensive linemen admitted using steroids, as did 14.8 percent of defensive linemen.
Over the years, different sporting bodies have evolved differently to the war against doping. Some, such as athletics and cycling, are becoming increasingly vigilant against doping in their sports. However, there has been criticism that sports such as soccer and baseball are doing nothing about the issue, and letting athletes implicated in doping walk away unpunished
Just as the sports leagues and government find out about one kind of steroid and ban it another form of it is created. Athletes find ways to cheat steroid test and continue to lie about using the steroids. At some point steroids became an accepted fact of sports by the government and sports industry.
Even though steroids have a impart on a athletes health, mental ability, and other impacts today steroids have changed the way athletes compete and raised the level of expected performance in whatever sport they are in.
The bottom line is that steroids have changed sports forever.