Why Steroids Are Bad for Professional Sports?
Steroid use in sports has cost professional athletes in the excess of billion dollars; alone with careers and reputation to include worldwide embarrassment. So why do athletes continue to walk the fine line, with the continued use of steroids. Steroids have been ban from all professionals’ sports worldwide and poise a continued health risk; addictions; and possibly death. The use of steroids is an epidemic, the United states government has tried to discourage the use of steroids and continue to fail, due to the alarming rate of users around the world. Steroid use in sports is cheating in the eyes of sports authorities.
That is because the use of anabolic steroids and other similar drugs enhances the performance of an athlete and gives the athlete an unfair advantage over others working mostly through their own efforts. It violates the honor-bound code that sportsmen are supposed to follow.
Despite this, however, it does not stop many athletes from taking anabolic steroids and other performance enhancers to improve their game. A lot of them thought they could get away with it. But once they are caught using steroids, their careers become over.
Pro: Steroids are synthetic substance like the male hormone testosterone. Steroids make muscles bigger and bones stronger. Steroids also cause puberty to start and can help some boys who have a genetic disorder to grow more normally. Enhances athletic performance in the following ways: endurance capabilities enhancement during exercise muscle recovery increase. Used medically to treat the following symptoms and diseases: anemia due to kidney failure, HIV, and some cancers.
CON: There are many arguments that suggest that steroids are bad for professional sports. Here are a few of known fact facts to support that argument. Steroids can cause serious side effects. Some of these can be permanent. In men steroids, can reduce sperm count; cause shrinking of testicles; enlarged breast; and affect the ability to father children. In women steroids, can increase body hair; make skin rough; decrease breast size; enlarge clitoris and deepen the voice. Steroids can have even greater consequences, which can lead to high blood pressure; heart attack; stroke; liver disease and possibly liver cancer.
Athletes have used extreme measures to attempt to cheat on urine drug tests, such as inserting a catheter into their penises and filling their bladders with drug-free urine, wearing a special holding bag full of clean urine attached to a prosthetic penis, and pouring whiskey into the urine sample to mask the illegal drugs.
http://www.testcountry.org/famous-steroid-use-cases-in-us-sports.htm#comment-368350
[…] Barry Bonds was one of the first big baseball steroid cases. Bonds was considered to be one of the greatest players of all time, winning seven MVP awards, 14 All-Stars, and hitting an insane 762 home runs during his career. Then, it came out in the same investigation that caught Marion Jones that he’d been using steroids. He may legitimately have been one of the best players baseball has seen, but we’ll never know for sure. Although he became a free agent after the scandal, nobody will touch him. […]
Summary: The Summer Olympics (0.49%) have nearly double the percentage of reported doping cases as the Winter Olympics (0.28%). Athens 2004 was the most doped Olympics with 26 reported violations of anti-doping rules. Weightlifting is the most doped sport with 36 violations - 28.4% of all Olympic doping cases. Austria has the most doping violations in the Olympics (10) followed by Greece and Russia (tied for second with nine) and then the USA with eight. The four Olympic doping charts below were compiled from over 20 sources and provide a handy summary of doping in the Olympic Games from 1968-2010. More than 40 Chinese swimmers failed drug tests between 1990 and 2000, triple the amount of any other nation's swim team in that same time period. The first athlete to die in Olympic competition due to doping was Danish cyclist Knut Jensen, who died on Aug. 26, 1960 at the Summer Olympics in Rome during the 100km team time trial race. His autopsy revealed traces of an amphetamine called Ronicol. |
Background: Caroline K. Hatton, PhD, former Associate Director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory of the University of California at Los Angeles, in a Aug. 2007 Pediatric Clinics of North America article titled "Beyond Sports-Doping Headlines: The Science of Laboratory Tests for Performance-Enhancing Drugs," offered the following: "The fight against drug abuse in sports has grown and improved ever since doping control began in the 1960s... The first step in a doping-control urine test is getting an authentic urine sample from the correct person and getting it sealed and documented for shipment to the laboratory... Next, the urine is poured into a pair of bottles, A and B, labeled only with numbers (eg, 963852A and 963852B) and the bottles are sealed... Blood is rarely collected in the major United States sports drug testing programs. At the Olympics, blood is collected, but not as often as urine. For example, at the 2004 Athens Olympics, the laboratory received 2926 urine samples and 691 blood samples.
Testing urine is better than testing blood for most prohibited substances (small molecules, molecular weight less than ~800 atomic mass units). Urine collection is noninvasive and yields a large volume of sample, with higher drug concentrations than in blood and with far fewer cells and proteins to complicate extraction..."