The last decade has shown us many athletes who have had their accomplishments questioned due to drug use, and it’s happening more and more often. Many respected and seemingly talented athletes have seen their reputations tarnished after accusations of drug use reveal that they had a little extra help in their performances.
It is possible to compare the greatest athletes of today with those of yesteryear, when performances were simply a show of human physical prowess as opposed to a man or woman helped along by foreign substances? It really doesn’t seem that it’s even possible to compare the two.
There is a growing number of sports fans who, upon discovering that their favorite athletes have been using performance-enhancing drugs, are boycotting these sports in disgust. Baseball in particular is seeing fans abandoning the sport in disappointment.
According to recent statistics, ticket sales for baseball games have gone down by 1-2%. That doesn’t seem like much, but when many other sports are seeing increases in attendance, it doesn’t reflect well on baseball’s popularity and it has the league concerned.
League officials are taking steps to wrestle with the drug problem and reign in the use of these substances. Bud Selig, the Commissioner of the MLB, has had his science advisor working on developing a test for the use of human growth hormone.
Selig would like to see HGH use erased from the sport of baseball altogether. Although there is currently a ban on the substance by the Major League Baseball Association, there are no tests or penalties currently in place for dealing with HGH use.
Ideally the “honor system” would work in terms of enforcing athletes to turn out natural performances, but in reality it’s not doing much to curb drug use. Athletes who disobey the rules by taking illegal drugs are probably not going to have a problem lying about it as well.
It’s easy to think about the old days of baseball and feel a wave of nostalgia. For one, in the old days we knew that our favorite athletes were simply people who worked hard to achieve their goals and succeeded.
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