With Alex Rodriguez coming clean about steroids, some of the Tailgate Crashers staff look at the issue of steroids a little more in depth…
1. What needs to be done about steroids in sports?
Ryan Lester (LestersLegends.com): Lifetime ban for a positive test. There is so much money involved the chemists are always ahead of the testers. If you had serious consequences for using, perhaps it would deter people from getting started.
Eugene Tierney: I don’t think there is much more they can do at this point. The testing policies are doing what they can for current athletes and it too late to do anything about players who have retired.
Eric Szulczewski: What needs to be done is to cast the whole argument in a different light. Except for the most fanatical of sports fans and, importantly, the members of the sports media, the focus has been completely on competitive advantage. That argument doesn’t wash with sports fans in general. We know instinctively that athletes will attempt to gain any advantage that they can when competing. We know this because we as weekend warriors would do it. If I could walk into GNC today and pick up a bottle of something that was guaranteed to add twenty yards to my drives, yeah, I’d buy it, and if there was something in there that would guarantee to straighten out my drives, I’d beg for it. The stakes for pro players are so high these days that it’s almost justifiable that they take performance-enhancing drugs.
That’s why this whole situation is getting a giant shrug. The sportswriters need to get out of their ivory towers (see #3) and start focusing on the real issue here: extended use of anabolic steroids is not feasible from any medical standpoint. That practice violates the most basic principle of medicine: Do No Harm. Anabolic steroids are proven to be harmful to physical and mental health (“roid rage” is not anecdotal) when taken long-term. Their only legitimate medical use is as a short-term supplement to the body’s healing process to recover from injury. Yet there are very few stories these days that even mention the Lyle Alzados of the world, who’ve died because they’ve fiddled with the body’s endocrine system.
The media must treat this redirect responsibly. The tendency is to get alarmist, and that’s the one thing they can’t do, plaster “Steroids Kill” stories all over the place. They need to take a rational approach and present the information without judgment. At that point, it becomes the individual’s responsibility in regard to risk/reward, which is where the responsibility ultimately must lie. You can find more information about SARMS on Noon Proposition 56 website.
Danny Cox: It’s hard to say really because so many sports today have some pretty damn strict punishments for these offenses. Three strikes in the Majors and you’re gone for life. Three strikes in the NFL and you’re suspended for a year without pay. I’m not one hundred percent certain what the policy is in the NBA or NHL but hopefully it is along the same lines as the NFL and MLB. A serious punishment system needs to be instilled in every professional and collegiate level sport and perhaps trickle even further down because it just isn’t fair to the sport, the fans, and aspiring athletes.
Look back at high school and think about the kids that were on teams with you. I was never big or good enough to play on the football or basketball teams, but watched as other players excelled. Good for them. I was on the soccer and baseball teams and had a pretty good level of talent and played well in both sports. I would never have and never would take steroids for an advantage but there are those that possibly did so my mind wants to know how that would make you feel! When you have a God-given talent for a particular sport and then someone gets an unfair advantage that you aren’t willing to take; where does that leave you? It leaves your dreams crushed and your life scrambling to find another profession now that you have no chance at being one of the chosen few.
Suspend them and then banish them for life if they don’t learn. I don’t give a damn who they are.
Kraig Doremus: A harsher testing policy is needed, and steroids need to be eliminated.
Chad Jorgenson: Something. Better testing, more frequent testing, harsher penalties. Or, we can do the opposite, give in to ‘roids, and just make sure every one is using them correctly. Build bigger ball fields, raise the rim a foot. Embrace it.
Alex Schuhart: It seems like the current system is do well in baseball at least. There are always going to be those who try to cheat the system no matter what the penalty.
Steven Gepp: I would say what needs to be done is a zero tolerance policy. If you get caught, you’re out, that’s it. But, this brings me to a conundrum, as steroids are, I feel, capable of being used in a medically-aided recovery from serious injury. Considering sports people get paid for their performances, being out for long periods of time reduces their earning capability. They have a limited window of opportunity (maybe 10 years) in which they can earn money, and steroids can help reduce time lost. (I have to say, a prominent Australian sports broadcaster said this very thing a few years ago, and was shouted down and hounded so much he was forced to withdraw his statements.) The fact is there is nothing that can get a sportsperson back as fast. There are, of course, other options, but none are as effective.
But the actual “doing something about steroids” can only be done by mandatory testing for everyone involved in sport (at all levels) three times a year, all at random. But with tests costing hundreds of dollars and the amount of professional athletes also requiring a team of testers and collectors, we are looking at a multi-billion dollar expense.
So what needs to be done cannot be done. But there is another issue to consider, and that is the athletes themselves. A study in 1987 involving US College athletes posed them this question: If you were offered a drug which would guarantee an Olympic gold medal, completely undetectable, but you would die within 5 years after taking it, what would you do? More than three quarters answered they’d take it. Winning is too important.
So the final thing is, while “winners and losers” is what sport is all about, it is the job of the media to not emphasise the winners so much, to not harp on them, to give them all consideration. I do not advocate getting rid of winners and losers (as was tried pathetically in the 1990s in South Australia to the detriment of our sport from which we have not really recovered) but not making sport the focus of everyone’s lives. Talk up scientific break-throughs, volunteer organisations, anyone else. The mainstream media (not a dedicated sporting publication) needs to de-emphasise sport. And sports people need to be paid realistically. Millions of dollars a season? I know they have a limited shelf life, but to earn more in one season than a dedicated teacher will earn in their entire life-time… Is putting a round thing into another thing really that important in the grand scheme of things? Only when sport is de-emphasised will the choice to take steroids be less likely to seem appealing.
2. Is the government justified in getting involved?
RL: No. They have bigger fish to fry.
ET: No – not with soldiers fighting over seas and the economy in the crapper.
ES: Yes. Anabolic steroids are a controlled substance by US law. They can only be prescribed by doctors for specific reasons. They cannot be sold over-the-counter. Usage must be medically monitored, both for legal reasons and for ethical ones (from the doctor’s standpoint). The issue here in regard to government is a legal one only. Congress should be focusing on this issue from that standpoint, namely why people without medical degrees are distributing this stuff and shooting needles into people’s butts. If they want to put any focus on competitive advantage, keep that secondary in order to give the issue a more emotional appeal, but don’t make it the sine qua non.
DC: Of course they are. It is blatantly obvious that some sports are willing to sacrifice a few of their morals and bend a couple of their rules if one of their biggest money draws gets into a scandal of some sort. The government can keep things a little more balanced and why shouldn’t they get involved if something is federal offense? You did the crime then do the time!
KD: No. Let the people in autority of that sport handle the steroids. (Bud Selig, David Stern etc…)
CJ: Yes. Last I checked, steroids were illegal. And when it’s said that there was a culture of steroids in baseball or any other sport, the Government has every right to look into it just as if there was a culture of tax evasion in sports. Yes, congress should have other things on their minds, but they should be looking into this. Selig, Stern, Goodell, and the leaders of all the other sports have proven they don’t care, they see money flowing into their sport and they’re going to look the other way.
AS: No, let the sports and the private individuals take care of it.
SG: This is tough, and I would look at it the way I look at all drug-taking. Punish the dealers / suppliers / whoever… but not the users. Instead, the users have to pay for any treatment they need. They have chosen to take drugs / smoke / drink / eat 10kg of fried chicken at a sitting, they can live with the consequences. Or pay to get better. If they steal to feed their addiction, full force of the law. I am overweight and I drink – I accept that I would most likely have to pay for the inevitable heart attack coming my way under this plan. If they can’t afford to pay… how did they afford the drugs? Addiction is NOT a disease – it is a choice. There have been genetic studies that indicate some people are more prone to becoming addicted (with the same addiction genetic make-up also present in the overtly religious and gamblers), but no-one makes them start to take the substance in the first place. Steroids are the same.
3. Should players who have tested positive for steroids be allowed to hold records and enshrined in their sport’s Hall of Fame?
RL: Yes. If you turned a blind eye to the cheating you have to live with it. You can’t pick and choose who you think was using at the time. There’s no proof that the good guys like Cal Ripken, Jr., Ken Griffey, Jr., Frank Thomas, David Ortiz, etc. never used. You can’t give some players passes because of their personality and villify other who are a bit more caustic.
ET: Yes – you can’t single people out at this point. Yes, some players were caught; a majority haven’t been. You can’t say player X, who tested positive and admitted it, is a future Hall of Famer while player Y, who never tested positive but was suspected, isn’t.
ES: Yes, from two standpoints. First of all, we are now fully aware of the ubiquity of performance enhancers in professional sports. The NFL was awash in steroids and cocaine during the Eighties (and coke is a performance enhancer), and those players have not been graded on a curve regarding possible drug use. Their way to Canton isn’t blocked. How many basketball players now in Springfield were doing tootski? The reason that they made it is because of a lack of media attention to the problem, at the time and now.
The second standpoint belongs to baseball. The moralistic prigs who compose the membership of the BBWAA see themselves as the guardians of the game’s integrity, and they’re the ones who decide who’s going to Cooperstown. They take pride in their insularity and whacked-out logic. They’re not doing their job. Their job is to judge which players were the pinnacle of the game in the particular era they played in.
We are certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that anabolic steroids were part of baseball’s culture and were accepted by the players. Use was endemic to the point of being ubiquitous. We’re no longer able to tell the dopers from the clean guys. This isn’t a first for baseball. Let’s bring up the three standard counter-arguments: alcohol during Prohibition (as illegal as anabolics are today), greenies (but, gee, amphetamines were OTC until the mid-1950s), and racism (which provided a huge competitive advantage to the players between the 1880s and 1947). Cooperstown is overloaded with plaques of boozehounds, speedheads, and Kovert Klanners. But no one’s clamoring to get rid of them. After all, what would a Baseball Hall Of Fame be like without Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb? Those magnificent, oh-so-precious numbers that baseball writers focus on like mantras? They’re already tainted in one form or another.
It would be hypocritical for baseball writers to ignore all of that and still lock deserving players out because they happened to play in an era where if you weren’t using, you were putting yourself at a disadvantage because everyone else was using. The question is still the same: was the player great in the era he played in? If that era happened to include steroids, that has to be compensated for. There are objective advanced metrics available for comparisons with earlier eras, but there are also too many writers in the BBWAA who reject them and try to compare apples with genetically-engineered, chemically-treated oranges.
Fortunately, the BBWAA is starting to do something to open themselves up. The admission of Internet-based writers is a good first step. But full reform of the voting membership of the Baseball Hall Of Fame will not come soon enough for some of the guys who deserve to get in and won’t, all because there was a specific type of performance enhancer around that happened to damage their precious numbers. That’s petty.
DC: No and screw this junk about an asterisk next to the record because no matter what you say; that still means their name is in the record book. Announcers and sports analysts will always say that “So-And-So needs to beat this guy’s record but let’s not forget the asterisk next to his name because of that steroids scandal!” But no matter what that asterisk is always going to be next to the number that needs to be beaten for a record to fall. Absolutely ridiculous.
As for the different Halls? No way in hell should they be allowed a spot in the most prestigious of the prestigious if they were positively proven to have cheated at the sport in which they were best at. Because you know what? That cheating means they weren’t the best at it. They do not deserve the honor of being placed with the great players that worked their asses off in order to help their teams and hopefully one day be placed in a place for all to see. That way their accomplishments will be able to be viewed by everyone who didn’t have the privilege of seeing them play. I see no reason why people thirty or even sixty years into the future need to walk past a bronze bust or see an encased locker of a guy that used steroids to be the best of his time. Don’t even mention the scandal or the case or the person at all in the Hall of Fame because it would still associate them with that sport and that is not even something they deserve.
KD: No. They cheated, therefore they shouldnt hold records or be enshired.
CJ: I’m going to have to say yes. I hate it, I don’t want Bonds to have the home run record, but unless it comes out what every player was doing and when they were doing it, we will never know the full extent of steroid use. And if you don’t know all the facts, you can’t keep them out.
AS: Yes. You still have to be a good/great player to put up good/great numbers, with steroids and without. This is an era, and each era has different things that are good and bad. I mean, in the 1960s the mound was raised and lowered because it gave batters an unfair advantage at times and pitchers an unfair advantage at times. Does that mean we shouldn’t recognize those players? No, it was just an era in the game. It’s how the game was.
SG: No. In fact, I feel every record set by swimmers in the past few years in fastsuits should be wiped as well (or at least asterisked), as the suits contravene FINA rule number 10. Otherwise, next time I run a marathon, I’m using a motorbike. What’s the difference? I’m using something to help me as much as the guy with EPO.
4. Which sports have the best testing policy? The worst? Can we even answer this?
RL: None.
ET: I can’t really say, as I don’t know the policies for the other major sports. I do think that it’s hard to say they work when new PEDs are created that current tests can’t detect.
ES: I’d say that the best testing program almost certainly belongs to the Olympics. They’ve been doing it the longest, they have the most-detailed programs, and they’re a model for every other drug testing program in the world. But not even they can keep up with pharmaceutical advances and trends. The worst? You can’t say, because too many testing programs have to create a balance between reducing competitive advantage and violating basic rights of players as negotiated in labor agreements. That being said, I think we can all firmly say that if there’s something incredibly wrong with the testing policies of the Tour de France. When the WWE’s drug-testing policy makes you look bad, you’ve got problems.
DC: I like the policy that the NFL has in place honestly because of the first strike and it’s a four-game suspension. Two strikes and you get an eight-game suspension. Three strikes and you are gone for a year and all of these suspensions are without pay. I like that policy a lot and think it is pretty damn good. The MLB policy is great as well, but I’d like to know that of the NBA, NHL, and even MLS. Obviously none of them are good enough though since it keeps happening no matter how many players end up suspended or banned.
KD: I dont think we can really answer this question well. All the major sports need improvement on their testing policies
CJ: Ummm….curling? All the sports testing needs to be improved. Whether it hurts or not, blood testing should be mandatory.
AS: Who knows.
SG: This is hard because too many sports hide their results and the way they do things. In Australia, if an Australian rules footballer is found guilty of taking a banned substance, the first offence is not even reported to his club! Olympic Games seem to have the best testing; everyone else seems to have mediocre. In fact, on paper, the WWE has one of the better testing regimes (of course, how it works in practice is another matter).
5. Which big name player will be the next to be named?
RL: Does it matter? Naming a guy here and there does nothing but perpetuate the Witch Hunt.
ET: This is speculation, but based off changes in performance before and after testing, Bret Boone seems like he did – he played well until shortly before testing and quickly fell of. I also think Barry Bonds’s name is on the list of 104.
ES: If Ken Griffey Junior isn’t part of the Hundred and Three, I’ll be shocked. The same physical evidence is there that people constantly cite with Barry Bonds, only more subtle. The hammy injuries alone raise suspicions. No, Canseco didn’t mention him, but Canseco’s an attention whore, and he had bigger names to fry. Now that Griffey’s become the Last Great Hope for the era, expect attention on him to drastically increase.
DC: It’s hard to tell because there are bound to be hundreds of players in every sport (most notably the NFL and MLB) that could be outed or simply come forth and admit it. A-Rod, Canseco, Tejada, Bonds…or maybe we’ll get another week when eight players are called out in the NFL like we did last season for that water pill/banned substance. I have no real way of knowing this and don’t think anyone does, but I doubt A-Rod is going to be the last big name or even the biggest name before this steroids’ thing is nipped in bud. If that ever happens of course.
KD: I honestly dont know.
CJ: Lebron James
AS: Any of the guys who had monster years in the early 2000s. Rich Aurilia, Luis Gonzalez, Adrian Beltre, etc etc
SG: I’d hate to name names, but I’m thinking Bolt, the sprinter. Or the Williams sisters. As a sports scientist, looking at the physique of these… girls, there is a lot that is masculine about them. Just saying…
6. Were you surprised about Alex Rodriguez being named? Admitting it?
RL: No and no. How can you be surprised by a SS on pace for 800 HRs? He saw what Clemens and Bonds are going through vs. Giambi and Pettitte. The decision had to be an easy one.
ET: A little surprised he was named. I never thought about him when I hear about players on steroids. I’m also a little surprised he admitted it – the only other 2 names as big as his have denied it. At the same time, the players who have said they did it and were sorry have had an easier time staying in the game.
ES: No to the first, yes to the second…well, to the extent that he did admit it. He’s outright lied in interviews before about anabolics.
For the interview, he chose his interlocutor perfectly, because, let’s face it, the admission was done to satisfy one audience: the baseball media. Peter Gammons was the best guy to go to in this instance, because Gammons is both an East Coast Bias shill and one of the biggest Ivory Tower guys in the BBWAA, all while having a positive image among his fellow reporters. Gammons was the perfect guy to go to in order to give the image of gravitas to the issue while making certain that the Best Interests Of The Game would be protected. The admission was a totally controlled environment, and A-Roid admitted just barely enough to satisfy the media. With the media satisfied, the fallout could be controlled through their stories. That type of manipulation might have worked ten years ago, but not now, not in the Internet Age. There’s too much independent reporting and op-eding out there for the public to be buffaloed by A-Roid and his near-non-admission.
DC: Honestly I was. A-Rod is a guy that has had God given talent since he was a much younger player. Rodriguez was never that big a guy and didn’t need to be because he could hit, throw, and field like he was born with a baseball in his hand. I’m not sure anyone is worth as much money as he’s been receiving from teams, but he was given the gift and proceeded to make it almost worthless because he wanted more.
What bothers me most is his excuse and to be a grown man and blame it on peer pressure. You big ol’ whiny ass baby! You had the weight of the world on your shoulders and needed to perform better then ever before…so you took a banned substance that you had no idea what it was? A little tip for all those women out there wanting to make time with A-Rod. Find out what bar he is at one night and bring him a drink filled with roofies. No matter that you’re a stranger and bring him something that he has no earthly clue what is, but he’ll take it and drink it. If he even attempts to refuse it then let him know that he’ll be letting the fans down if he doesn’t drink it. That’s a sure bet then that he’ll go along with your wishes and drink whatever it is you place before him. Easy peasy Japaneezy!
Now I was even more surprised by his admitting it considering he was asked flat out a little over a year ago if he had done them before and he said no. So not only is he a cheater now but he’s also a big ass liar. Peer pressure made him take them yet doing an interview that is in the public eye of the entire world with one of the most well known television personalities (Katie Couric) doesn’t make you admit up to it? So no pressure there to not admit it and then lie about it. Now you look even more like a jackass.
KD: I wasn’t suprised about him being named, but I was very suprised he came out and admitted so soon.
CJ: I was a little surprised. He’d always been “the guy” when you pointed at someone you thought was clean. He was always big and always had a ton of natural talent, so it was a little surprising. I was actually less surprised that he came out and admitted it. One thing A-Rod doesn’t get enough credit for is being smart. He’s seen what’s happened to Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. At the same time, he’s seen what’s happened with Jason Giambi and Andy Pettite. He thought the second option seemed to work a bit better, so he took that route. And in the end, it’s probably the best thing he could have done.
AS: No, back in 2001/2002 I suspected he had used them, and I was right. I wasn’t surprised that he admitted it either – to save face he did it, not because he’s truly sorry.
SG: Surprised he took steroids? No. Surprised he admitted it? Oh, hell yeah. But good on him. At least he has the balls to admit he did something like this and not try to sue everyone who accuses him…
