Steroids In Sports Essay

A professional track athlete is training for the Olympics. For the athlete, his only dream is to win first place, training for more than 7 years. He trains and practices up to 6 hours per day. The athlete puts immense amounts of effort forward towards running and is expected to win. Another athlete wanting to get first place at the Olympics trains for only 1 hour per day and puts minimal effort forward. He knows he is not going to win with the effort he puts forward. The only thing that he thinks will guarantee winning first place is steroids so the athlete takes them. The race takes place and the athlete who took steroids ends up in first place, whereas the honest and virtuous athlete ends up taking second place. Due to all the success steroids

According to ProCon.org, “Anti-doping programs seek to preserve what is intrinsically valuable about sport. This intrinsic value is often referred to as 'the spirit of sport…” (Top 10 Pro). This article states that the programs that prevent the use of steroids promote the fair play, ethics, and honesty that make up sports. Moreover, as stated by WADA, the World Anti Doping Agency, “Doping, the use of artificial enhancements to gain an advantage over others in competition, is cheating and is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sport”(WADA). This evidence emphasizes the fact that steroids are a wrongful and dishonest way to win. For example, “The U.S. weightlifting team was no match for the Russians at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland. That year the Russian team won medals in seven events. Dr. John Ziegler, the U.S. team’s doctor, later discovered that the Russian training program included regular use of testosterone” (Knight 15). The U.S team would have won but the Russian team cheated and robbed the other honest teams including the US team of their rightful medals. Not only is this unfair, but it is immoral. Steroids should not be used due to the lack of honesty