ClarkDark’s BodyBlog

The fallout from the Mitchell Report on steroid use by pro athletes, and baseball players in particular, is the latest challenge to our notion of what is acceptable, fair and morally justifiable as we pursue our passion for competition and our obesession with winning and winners. Like most, I am very conflicted and somewhat disillusioned by many of the revelations regarding steroid use (Marion Jones’ confession was like hearing there is no Santa Claus or learning that Magic Johnson had contracted AIDS). However, I cannot bring myself to join the lynch mobs demonizing Jones, Barry Bonds, Olympia-level bodybuilders including Jay Cutler and Victor Martinez, and other athletes who have admitted to or are suspected of using, steroids and other banned performance enhancing substances.

Let’s take my favorite sport, professional football. The average NFL career is just over three years, depending on the position you play and how long you can avoid (or play with) injury, getting cut for a younger/faster/lower-paid player or traded to a team with a system that does not play to your athletic strengths. Unfortunately, steroids can be the difference between staying in the NFL or being out of the league.

If you are married with, say, two kids, with a bachelor’s degree and little or no job experience outside of sports, this can be the difference between a salary of $460,000 (the NFL minimum for players with 3 years of service) and between $30,000 and $55,000 (the average starting salary for a person with a bachelor’s degree, depending on their major). I know a lot of people, including me, who would chance steroid use if it meant extending an NFL career for even just a year at the league’s salary minimum, especially if it meant being able to provide things such as college for my kids. I think this is the case for elite athletes in nearly every sport, including baseball, Olympia-level bodybuilding and the Olympics. And remember, these high salaries come with virtually no health, retirement, pensions or other benefits that many of these athletes will need later in life, when their incomes will be a fraction of their playing salaries and the illness and the deterioration of their bodies will accelerate at a rate far greater than the average non-athlete.

I am not saying steroid use is good, right or morally justified. I don’t use steroids, but no average person I know who sees me gulping down creatine, loads of amino acids in the form of pills, powders and shakes, HMB, tribulus, etc., thinks of what I do as "natural nutrition." So I’m conflicted about pointing the disapproving finger at those using "performance enhancers", except for the fact that we should not endorse the idea of people deliberately shortening their lives and damaging their health to succeed. Isn’t the point of me popping all of these supplements to improve my performance in the gym? How would we react if there was a movement to define "natural" as only those nutrients we could get from whole foods? We all know that lobbyists for the supplement industry would be at red-alert status to fight that notion, no matter what their position is on steroid use.

I am saying that if the organizing bodies of these sports (MLB, NFL, Olympics, IFBB, etc.) can’t or won’t set and enforce the standards of competition, I can’t be mad at individual athletes feeling motivated to risk steroid use to build and maintain the careers needed to provide for themselves and their families. The point of the Mitchell Report should not be to demonize individual athletes, but to hold the governing bodies, television/media companies, the sporting goods industry and team owners of pro sports (who are the ones making the real money here) accountable, too. They benefit from steroid use far more than the athletes do, and I don’t see them rushing to return the billions they’ve made off of the exploits of Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, or Ronnie Coleman or any other athlete who many of us are rushing to condemn, take medals from or place asterisks by their names.