by Jeff Johns

Created on: March 10, 2010   Last Updated: March 13, 2010

Call it an edge or tilting the table in their favor. For as long as there as been sport or competition, participants and athletes have looked for or sought out an advantage in an effort to win. As UCLA Bruins football coach “Red” Sanders famously said, "Men, I'll be honest. Winning isn't everything. Men, it's the only thing!"

With that mindset front and center, it is clear that despite all of the negative press, league testing and suspensions and a long history of negative medical consequences, the so-called steroid era in baseball is not over, but merely taking a hiatus. At some point, the ongoing development of next generation, test resistant, performance enhancers will create an undeniable lure to an athlete looking for that winning edge.

Why would a highly skilled, supremely talented, athlete risk the public humiliation and the damage to their health and well being by taking performance enhancing hormones and other artificial substances? The answer is as simple as the risk to reward ratio.

First off, if we are being honest, the risk of getting caught taking these substances is relatively minor. Most of the high profile athletes that have made headlines for steroid use, the Mark McGwire's, Jason Giambi's and Alex Rodriguez's have admitted that use through self-implication, rather than by being caught by a drug test.

Steroid users have broken records, won championships, been rewarded with accolades and huge bonuses, more often than not with impunity. Despite the thoughts of some pundits, sports talk hosts and fans there have not been asterisks placed in record books after the names steroid using record breakers. While a few individual medals and trophies have been stripped by international athletics governing bodies, no trophies to date have been retrieved by professional sports leagues.

It may take that kind of hard-nosed approach, where leagues penalize not only the individual steroid abusers, but also their teams, by stripping away wins, championships and the huge cash rewards that part and parcel of winning the big one. Only when that happens, will professional sports leagues prove that they take seriously the damage to the overall state of their respective sports that are being done by these steroid users.

Up to this point, leagues have talked tough, but really taken a wink and nod approach to policing steroid use by their superstar players. Complicit in this whole process are the player unions and associations, which all to often turn a blind eye to what is really going on in training rooms and locker rooms around their leagues. These guys spend so much time together, training, traveling and living together, they know who the users of this stuff are. If the chances of having a championship or a crucial victory taken away were in place, then the chances of real self-policing would increase.

The bottom line really boils down to what the fans are willing to accept. As long as they continue to line up to purchase tickets, buy merchandise and provide televised sports with an audience, team owners will limit the power that their league appointed leadership will be able to bring to bare on the problem of performance enhancing drugs. Athletes looking to win and score that next big financial windfall will be willing to take what amounts to a relatively small risk.

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