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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

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