Steroid Guide Review

A look at steroid use in pro sports

It would be very surprising to note that steroid use in pro sports will bring us back to times of the Greeks, where the Olympics started over four thousand years ago. Athletes of the ancients ate herbs and body parts of exotic animals believed to boost energy and strength. Leveling the playing field and instituting fair play were something that the ancients were too particular about of course, and were no less meticulous on these matters. But as far as the participants’ abilities are concerned, they didn’t mind about the rise of diets that were purported to improve the edge of athletes against others.

In today’s modern world, the herbs and animals are substituted for synthetic testosterone hormones, the fruit of advances in pharmaceutical research for the better part of the last fifty years and the product of much debate, medal stripping, and tortured national egos. The first suspected steroid use in pro sports was in Olympic Games of 1936, when Germany sent athletes of world-breaking strengths and superhuman sports abilities. Other countries, notably Russia, followed suit and started injecting their athletes with synthetic testosterone products that were developed extensively and allegedly financed and approved by governments.

It was around 1970s that World Health Organization issued an official warning about steroids being produced and released to different countries around the world. International Olympics Committee followed in its historical ban for sport-enhancement drugs, including anabolic steroids. What is needed to remember here is that the committee was driven by moral and ethical stand and not by scientific backings.

The rise of professional sports and the money that comes with have attracted talented young people across the country. As it happens, the lure of prestige and successful sports career have also created tensions among sports committees and athletes on the question of using drugs that are banned in Olympics. To date, Sports Illustrated reported that one player saying that “half of (baseball) guys” are using steroids and in fact joking about it. Major League Baseball, as reported, was the last professional sports to institute a committee screening drugs among athletes.

The fact however remains that for as long as there are professional sports, steroids use in pro sports will continue unabated.