Yes

by Ian Prichard

Created on: August 07, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

The main argument against steroid use in sports usually boils down to "fairness," and if we stop and look at those who complain about the unfairness of steroids, we find that at its core this argument masks an emotion to which few like to admit: envy. As has been mentioned in several of these "yes" articles, sport has its roots in martial combat; it was a way to stay fit between battles, a way for soldiers to show off their prowess while away from the fields of war, and it has always been, at its highest levels, populated by the finest physical specimens a people have to offer. If someone could do something to make him a better soldier, he would be revered for doing the same thing to make himself a better athlete. It has only been relatively recently in human history that the average Joe could partake in sports at any serious level, and even more recently that sports have been professionalized, and with this advent has come the application of certain social constructs to sport, in this case, fairness.

Granted, we do live in a much different world than the original Olympians, and the best athlete doesn't necessarily make the best soldier, nor the best soldier the best athlete. We live in a hi-tech world, in which we have the capability to develop artificial and pseudo-natural compounds that increase performance. People love pointing to two specific examples, both from baseball: Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. The Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire detractors always cite these first two as hallmarks of true grit, men who set their records without the aid of performance enhancers. True. But the same performance enhancers were not available then, and I never met either Aaron or Ruth to know whether they'd have been above doping. And more than that is different today: gloves, shoes, helmets, balls. The pitching is a different world, due in some part due to the performance enhancers some pitchers undoubtedly consume. Baseball, and every other professional sport, are even more ruthlessly and unapologetically business-minded than they were even just before the baseball and hockey strikes and money-grubbing team swappers brought the aura of true sport crashing down.

I, too, wish we could go back to a period in which people engaged in sport for sport's sake, tested their mettle against another in a high-ideal Olympic contest, no matter how small the scale. But this, of course, is a false nostalgia. There have always been money-grubbers, greed-driven owners and agents, amoral people ambitious only for their laurels, no matter the cost. We live in a greedy world, populated every day by greedier and more ambitious people. However unfortunate it may be, sport is no hallowed ground, and the rules that apply to our capitalistic society and mentality govern there, too. As a swimmer, I never wanted to be racing against a doped opponent, because I wouldn't have won - I had a hard enough time winning as it was. I wouldn't have won, because I wouldn't have taken performance enhancers. I wouldn't have taken them because they were illegal. Would I have taken them had they been legal? Perhaps. Probably; I wanted to win, just like any athlete who is, at the end of the day, worth his salt wants to win. Because that is, after all, sport, and especially professional sport. There's a winner and a loser, and there will forever be stadiums full of the masses - masses simply incapable, by choice or by fate, of competing with the titans on the field - rooting for a winner. Those who complain of fairness complain only because they are not able to accomplish the feats of one better than they. People choose steroids to blame because they cannot hit 756 home runs, because they cannot win seven consecutive Tours de France, or win the World's Strongest Man, or go set for set with Federer. So, they sit with their morals and their Bud Lights and yell "Cheater!"

Legalizing steroids will give complainers one less thing to complain about, and will force athletes to ante up and take all the risks involved in becoming their best, as they always have. Was it advisable for Greeks to eat live bees for potency before matches, or for the Aztec and Mayan to imbibe hallucinogenic elixirs that numbed pain prior to their gory ritualistic sports? Probably not, and when we look to these old civilizations to exemplify what we should be honoring in keeping our sports and their ethics clean, we should keep this in mind.

Safety and player protection arguments are also a smoke screen for this latent envy. Of course, teenage consumption of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs or methods is not advisable, and too many parents have had to bury children who used performance enhancers. With legalization - like the legalization of many drugs - would come better access to medical oversight and care. If the leagues were really concerned with player health, they would outlaw a perfectly legal, terribly destructive, and in no way performance enhancing substance: chewing tobacco. The lines professional sports leagues draw to distinguish legal from illegal are irrational, anyway. Look at oxygen levels in blood. Training at altitude is considered tough, old school, and almost universally revered; sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber is looked at as dedication by some, frowned upon by others, but not outlawed by any major sports organization; pumping oneself full with two extra liters of one's own blood prior to a contest - blood doping - is universally outlawed and condemned. These three practices have the same effect; they increase the number of red blood cells that pass through the heart and over the lungs, increasing the amount of oxygen the athlete transports to working muscles. They each require, as was mentioned in another article, certain parameters, which carry with them inherent unfair advantages: availability of and access to training facilities at altitude; money to purchase and the time to sleep in a hyperbaric tent; access to a doctor or nurse or trainer willing and able to assist in doping. Although this debate is about steroids, the example is not mute; many substances that act as steroidal agents and have not made the "illicit" drug list find their way into athletes' bloodstreams and help athletes find their way higher up the podium.

As for separate leagues for steroid and non-steroid sports, as many wishy-washy do-gooders suggest, this is completely inviable in our mass-market televised world. Despite whatever good intentions and morals a viewer might have, the legacy of sport and its ability to tap into the latent martial combatant in everyone will always ensure that the hardest sacks, the wickedest haymakers, the furthest home runs, even the longest drives, are the ones that sell.

The moral: Don't expect men and women who get paid to win to satisfy your desire for purity. You want clean sport, go swim alone in the ocean.

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