Posted by
Crescen7(Regis Matejcik) on Friday, December 14, 2007 12:55:58 PM
Congress needs to attend the business of Government, and forget about micro managing professional sports. They are uninformed or stupid - probably both.
Steriods are not magic. They are not illegal. They are controlled. Not a single player has been charged with obtaining them illegally. They were also not prohibited in baseball until very recently.
Barry Bonds has been charged in a trumped up process crime. They asked him if he took steroids. He said no. Others said yes. They say that may be perjury or obstruction. It may be. Ask Scooter Libby or Martha Stewart. No one has charged Bonds with illegal sterioid use or posession, no one has ever tested him positive for a banned substance. If he did use steroids, they were likely legally obtained, and used during a period that there was no rule against it in Major League Baseball.
Simalarly, Mark McGuire broke no rules, broke no laws. Ban him because we've all become holistic.
Is surgery natural? How about over the counter creatine? How about numerous nutritional supplements? Where is the line drawn? And when did we start drawing it retroactively.
Steroids are most often prescribed, and are most effective for rebuilding injured muscle tissue. I did training consultation for two olympic athletes in the mid and late 80's. One became among the first American Olympic athletes to be banned from the olympics because of a positive test for a steroid masking agent.
Go to any gym in the United States and you'll find a number of gym rats who use steroids just to look better. Not a single one of them can hit a baseball from a major league pitcher. Muscle strength is almost incidental to hitting home runs. Virtually every adult male has the "strength" to generate the bat speed required to hit a home run. Certainly the gym rats that are bench pressing 400 lbs do. Yet, almost no one can routinely connect a round bat to a spherical ball thrown by a major league pitcher. So few, in fact, that those that do it as often as 30% of the time are considered to be worth 10's of millions of dollars a year.
Steroids help batters and pitchers for one reason. It allows them to train incessantly over an almost 200 game season without severe muscle degeneration. The advent of the pitching machine makes it possible for an elite batter to routinely take several hundred full speed swings a day. This allows batters to make the hand/eye coordination needed to connect with a 90+ mph a finely tuned skill. It also requires 10's of thousands of muscle contractions over the course of a season. Steroids make it possible to maintain a peak performance level for batters and pitchers over a long season.
Is that cheating? By the rules of today - yes. So go ahead and test and suspend offenders. By the rules of 5 years ago - no. So shut up and forget about it. You can't penalize some one for breaking a rule that wasn't there, but we now decide it should have been.
But what about the Children????
First, if you don't want kids to use this stuff, quit talking like it's a magic pill for athletic success. It's not.
Second, if your high school age or younger kid is illegally obtaining and using anabolic sterioids you are a crappy parent, and your kid is an idiot. I doubt Congress can legislate anything effectively to alter either of those condition.
Would it be cheating if similar results were obtained by using over the counter body building supplements? By the rules of today - no.
So when a bunch of politicians and sports writers want to create the next bunch of hysterics will they go after Creatine? Caffiene? Taurine? Anti-Estrogens? Methoxyisoflavone? Glutamine? Nitric Oxide? ZMA? Ecdysterone? Never heard of them? All legal. All available. All capable of producing significant muscle building effects. All dangerous? Probably, at least in some combination for some people.
All certain to be experiemented with by elite athletes attempting to gain that last increment of edge over their opponent.
Want to ban steroids because you think they're dangerous? Fine.
Want to ban athletes because they seek out and use every legal and available means of improvement. Good luck. You're wasting your time.