Pressure to Perform
Athletes using illegal performance
enhancing drugs have become a very common topic in today’s sports world. Why
wouldn’t it? Why does it surprise people when these athletes get caught taking
performance enhancers, when we have such high expectations for athletes to
perform? Professional baseball player,
Alex Rodriguez, really feels the pressure when getting called up to the show "When
I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an
enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on
top of me and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day"
(ESPN 2009). But when these athletes take performance enhancers we call them
“cheaters” disagreeing with their actions. These PED’s athletes are taking help
their bodies recover faster; they don’t make these players better athletes, which
would be considered “cheating”. Performance
Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) have always already been a part of sports culture. We
should legalize PEDs so that we can stop pretending that athletes are taking
them, the sports world needs to evolve and change its views on performance
enhancers.
Alex Rodriguez was the first overall pick in the 1994 MLB draft, to the Seattle Mariners. Alex was drafted strait out of high school as one of the top prospects in baseball, projected to be one on the best players of all time (Bio 2014). Alex has had an amazing twenty years in the MLB, winning multiple MVP and silver slugger awards while being a part of the all-star game fourteen times (Boyle par 4). Having achieved so many things in Alex’s twenty years the only thing people seem to remember him as is a “cheater”. Alex has admitted to using PED’s since his first year in the MLB (ESPN 2009). Alex felt an enormous amount of pressure having to perform at such a high level every day and felt the use of performance enhancers would allow him to perform at that level. It’s not just Alex that feels the tremendous amount of pressure from managers, fans and even family. Hundreds of players talk about the pressure they are under day in and day out. These athletes are maxing out their bodies to compete; performance enhancers can give these athletes the ability to stay healthy during their career. Allowing players the use of PED’s would take a tremendous amount of pressure off their bodies, giving these athletes less stress about their bodies recovering so they can focus on different aspects of their sport.
How do performance enhancing drugs
benefit ball players? There are many different types of PED’s: anabolic
steroids, stimulants, human growth hormones and supplements. Anabolic steroids help
the body build non-fat muscle mass by enhancing proteins in your body (CNN
2014). Athletes use anabolic steroids to originally become bigger and stronger,
but also keep them in the game longer. A lot of your top tear athletes have
gotten caught using anabolic steroids such as Barry Bonds and Marion Jones. If
you aren’t looking to get supper massive in the weight room but would like to
have more energy after workouts and practices then stimulants will solve that
problem. Stimulants are used to give athletes more energy after hard workouts,
speeding up the body’s recovery time. Human growth hormones (HGH) are used by
athletes to better their strength and endurance, HGH is hard for athletes to
get because you can only get it prescribed by a doctor (CNN 2014). People
believed that the use of HGH made the player a better athlete but studies have
shown that there is no proof of HGH making an athlete more athletic. There is
one performance enhancing drug that your everyday person could get over the
counter, Androstendione or “Andro”. Andro helps the body produce natural
testosterone giving athletes insane recover time and loads of energy. Andro has
been banned from the NFL, MLB, Olympics and the NCAA. These performance
enhancing drugs are giving players the ability to play their sport for longer
periods of time and building muscle two times faster than athletes that aren’t
using, not giving them talent to be better at sports.
Performance enhancing drugs have some very helpful advantages. The enhancement of testosterone is what most PED’s accumulate to. Testosterone has two jobs in the body: promotes muscle growth and is responsible for male traits. The PED’s gives the body a much higher dose than what your body naturally produces. When the body has too much testosterone it begins changing the appearance of a normal man: prominent breast, baldness, severe acne, increased body hair, shrunken testicals and more (Mayo Clinic staff 2012). The physical side-effects from juicing a human can handle, it’s the changing of natural functions your body does that will severely affect you: infertility, impotence, liver abnormalities and tumors, high blood pressure, prostate gland enlargement, heart and circulatory problems (Mayo Clinic Staff 2012). The list doesn’t stop there, PED’s will not only affect your body inside and out but it will affect your mind. Depression and aggressive behavior or the two most common mental side-effects from using PED’s, the high doses of testosterone can throw off the hormone balance causing these changes of the athlete’s mood.
“It has gotten to the
point where athletes from other countries are coming to the United States to
buy performance-enhancing drugs that are illegal in their home countries”
(Scott par 2). With the steroid era in full affect the government has come down
hard on the illegal use of PED’s and pretty much getting rid of the industrial
way of getting PED’s. “In the past 20 years, more effective law enforcement in
the United States has pushed much of the illegal steroid industry into the
black market. This poses additional health risks because the drugs are either
made in other countries and smuggled in or made in clandestine labs in the
United States. Either way, they aren't subject to government safety standards
and could be impure or mislabeled” (Mayo clinic staff 2012). 
The steroid era started during the 80’s and is still ongoing to this day. During the beginning fans were furious when they found out athletes were taking performance enhancers. Fans got so upset by this that they went on a strike from watching sports (mainly baseball) in the year 1994. Fans stopped attending games causing a huge decline in revenue and set records for attendance numbers. Even after the strike of 94’ fans were still mad at the managers and players feeling betrayed and lied to, baseball seemed to have taken a fall for the worst. Baseball needed something to happen to make people forget about athletes using performance enhancers, and what better than two of the best hitters in the game at that time chasing the single season record for most homeruns; Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs. Both hitters were having incredible years, putting the ball in the seats on regular bases. With these two all-star athletes chasing the record of most home runs in a single season by Roger Maris, 61 home runs (McIntyre 3rd bullet point). Baseball started making a comeback; it was like a golden egg had landed on the MLB’s lap. Reporters for the MLB took this story and made in global, putting baseball back on the map, in hopes that this will push the use of PED’s to the past. This story couldn’t have gone any better, towards the end of the season the Cardinals hosted the Cubs for a regular season game. Mark had tied Roger Maris’s record of 61 the night before and hoped to break the record at home against close friend Sammy Sosa. In the bottom of the 4th inning history was made, Mark scorched a line shot over the left field wall breaking Maris’s record of 37 years, baseball was back in business. The funny thing is, the thing that sent the MLB into insanely low revenue was also the thing that brought baseball back to life, performance enhancing drugs. Both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa tested positive for using performance enhancers and later confessed to taking PED’s during their baseball career. Even after these two all-starts were accused of using PED’s fans seemed to forget about it. Still to this day big time all-stars (Alex Rodriguez) have tested positive for performance enhancers and yet fans haven’t shown the hatred PED’s received in past decades. Fans are becoming aware of athletes using PED’s more every year, because more and more athletes are getting caught every year.
Performance enhancing drugs have changed the way
fans will look at sports from here on out. The use of PED’s is an ongoing cycle
that will increase every year with new technology and new types of performance
enhancers. These athletes are putting their bodies through hell everyday so
that we can watch them perform, so why not allow the use of PED’s to reduce the
stress put on their bodies? The culture
of sports is evolving, raising the standards for athletes to perform at higher
levels. Legalizing the use of performance enhancing drugs will allow athletes
to compete at a these levels the public wants to see. How can you call using
PED’s “cheating” if everybody is using them? You can’t.
Works Cited
Bio. “Alex Rodriguez Biography.” bio. Web. 25 July 2014.
Boyle, Deven. “Debate: should performance enhancing drugs be legal?” Outdoors blue ridge
magazine October 2013. Web. 25 July 2014.
CNN Library. “Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports Fast Facts.” CNN U.S. (2014). Web. 19
July 2014.
ESPN.com. “A-Rod admits, regrets use of PEDs” ESPN MLB 10 February 2009. Web. 25 July
2014.
Mayo Clinic Staff. “Performance Enhancing Drugs: Know the Risk.” Healthy Lifestyle: Fitness 12
December 2012. Web. 19 July 2014.
McIntry, Shawn. “Diamond Juice: Baseball’s steroid era and its effect on the game.” Hub pages:
Sports and Recreation 4 May 2014. Web. 21 July 2014.
Scott, Michael. “The use of Performance-enhancing Drugs in Sports.” Delta Winds (2008). Web.
19 July 2014.
