PED In Sports

The use of performance-enhancing drugs, or PED’s, in sports has been a significant cause of athlete ridicule over the past several years in the United States of America and throughout the world. PED’s are considered a banned substance in nearly every athletic competition that is regulated at the highest level. In America, the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), and Major League Baseball (MLB) are the largest professional sports companies, all of which have PED’s as a banned substance. Further, the players face significant fines, suspensions, and other penalties if they abuse the respective PED policies for each league. In this paper I will discover the history of PED use in sports, the side effects and uses,

Every athlete should be competing within a level playing field that a sanction is territorial in. It’s factual that not all individuals are capable of becoming as physically strong and imposing as others. This naturally may give an individual an advantage over many others due to their body’s natural ability and how that translate into their sport. However, athleticism and physicality are just part of sports. There are other ways around out competing those individuals that are considered outside the realm of athleticism and strength. Knowledge, sports IQ, desire, and hustle are a few of the intangibles that can’t be quantified easily. Those intangibles often become the driving influences in dethroning physical ability and prowess. However, in sports that asset physical, hand-to-hand dominance, PED’s should assuredly be banned. In combat fighting, like Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and football, where individuals are constantly rely on physical strength and endurance, it is unethical and potentially unsafe to put an individual on steroids in the playing field. In baseball, PED use remains unethical, however, there isn’t the hand-to-hand combat element that there is in many other sports, thus it takes much of the physical harm away from can occur. Further, I believe baseball is a more exciting and desirable product when the players are using PED’s. In the early 2000’s. MLB had the likes of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa hitting over 60 home runs a year. Again, unethical but it was a spectacle, nonetheless. Baseball’s popularity has dramatically declined over the last 12 years (huffingtonpost.com) and the rise of basketball and football have benefited