Lance Armstrong's Abuse Of Performance Enhancing Drugs

Professional athletes are always in competition with one another. Whether they want to be the leading homerun hitter in the MLB or the fastest sprinter in the Olympics, some athletes will stop at nothing to be the star of their chosen profession. Often times, if strict training doesn’t help, athletes turn to other, often illegal, solutions, such as performance-enhancing drugs. There has been speculation and confirmation about athletes using drugs to further themselves professionally since the late 1800s when amphetamine was first synthesized. This issue has been further publicized since Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal. Since the 1990s, many major athletic organizations have enforced drug testing standards to avoid such scandals. Lance Armstrong’s

These victories were revoked in 2012, when the United States Anti-Doping Agency concluded an investigation regarding allegations that Armstrong abused performance enhancing drugs throughout his career. The USADA banned him from competing in sports that follow the agency’s standards, thus ending his athletic career.
In January 2013, Lance Armstrong admitted to Oprah Winfrey in a live television interview that he used performance enhancing drugs from the mid-1990s up through his 2005 Tour de France victory. When asked to describe his doping process, Armstrong said:
“You had things that were oxygen boosting drugs – for lack of a better word or way to describe it – that were incredibly beneficial for performance or endurance sports, whether it’s cycling or running or whatever. And that’s all you needed. My cocktail so to speak was only EPO, but not a lot, transfusions and testosterone. Which in a weird way I almost justified [referring to testosterone] because of my history. Obviously, the testicular cancer and losing… I thought, surely I’m running

Canseco started using performance-enhancing drugs when he was 20 years old, when he played for the Oakland Athletics’ minor team. During his first full major league season in 1986, Canseco hit 33 homeruns and recorded 117 runs batted in as well as winning Rookie of the Year. At this time, Canseco was the only player in baseball using steroids. In his memoir Juiced, Canseco documents his experiences as The Chemist in the MLB, a nickname he received from his peers as he was the player most knowledgeable of steroids at the time. He discusses injecting Mark McGwire, a fellow teammate, with steroids in the bathrooms before games more times than he can remember. Canseco