Monday, January 11, 2010

Thoughts on Steroids

Mark McGuire admitted being on steroids during the season when he set the record for the most homeruns in baseball. This is disapointing, but not surprising. If you look up Olympic gold medalists, you will find Carl Lewis' name displayed, but if you are old enough to remember the olympics that year, you will remember that he was smoked by a certain Canadian who was built like Schwartzenegger, but was stripped of the gold after her tested positive for roids. For all eternity, whenever they show old Carl winning the gold, you will see him getting beaten by a guy who looks like the terminator, and the announcer will tell you about the steroids and disqualification. If Mark is stripped of the record, I wonder if Sammy Sosa will be the Carl Lewis of baseball. (and if Barry Bonds is reading this, just because you haven't come clean like Mark doesn't mean that you are fooling anybody).

The difference between someone who bats .200 and someone who bats .300 is an extra zero on the end of your paycheck. That's a lot of money for such a small difference in performance. When there is so much money at stake and people keep expecting feats from sports athletes that are, literally, not humanly possible without steroids, it is not surprising that athletes will resort to that. The surpirsing thing is that most of the people who use steroids are not professional athletes. They are weekend warriors in the 30s looking for an edge. For them, it's not about money, it's about winning. And if you decided that winning is more important than winning fairly, then I guess you can justify all kinds of things like insider stock trading, rigging a presidential election, creating a mortgage apocalypse, or getting the government to bail out your sh1tty car companies. Maybe steroids are just a side effect of a winner-take-all society?

5 comments:

Jessica said...

It's almost enough to make one wish for a society in which steroids weren't verboten, so that the public could view the detrimental affects more openly. As I understand it, recreational steroids don't yield more than a Phyrric victory.

Green Design said...

It is good to see you back to your blogging self. When people just try to win they cheat in many ways, look at what happened to all the contractors in Florida who used cheap quality drywall from China in 2009 and how terrible the result was. It is very sad.

Rickey said...
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