Steroids

I was reminded of the 2007 steroid controversy while reading an old issue of Sports Illustrated. When most people thought Bonds had retired from baseball, an article in this magazine disclosed Bonds trying to secure a position on any lineup.   He even made an attractive offer by agreeing to just 200k/year, a rate among the lowest-paid athletes.  Remember this was the summer after Bonds had come off of his 2007 home run record. 

Bonds' lay-off is because Congress and millions of fans have a lack of understanding of steroids. By association, Bonds’ steroid scandal made him too “controversial” for any team to consider him for a place on their lineup.  This fallacious consensus shows how little people know about steroids, drugs in general, nature vs. nurture and how professional sports work.

Believing that injecting steroids instantly turns you into a Bonds-caliber player is pure naivete.  All steroids do is is act as an anabolic hormones, something your body already produces.  This is in the form of testosterone, a hormone that is found in both men and women.  There is a higher amount in men, explaining why they are more muscle-dense than women.  Testosterone encourages the retention and building of muscle.  T also favors the breakdown of fat and release of glycogen in the form of glucose for the body's source of energy.  This is another action of anabolism.  

Bonds and many other athletes choose steroids not out of laziness but because they want to continue playing at the same intensity. Steroids are not for those who are trying to cut corners; if you’re not training, practicing or eating a proper diet, you will turn into a mush.  This is exactly what happens even when you are not a steroid user.  Barry Bonds was training for six to eight hours a day when he was at his peak.  That diligence made him a superstar in the 90's before he even anticipated steroids.

Bonds was already a highly-accomplished player throughout the 90's.  His batting average during his college career was .450.  That's not something you acquire from injecting synthetic hormones and then hitting the weights.  You must have good fundamental skills for a sport to do anything that is that technically amazing.  Bonds is by no means lazy.  Just making it to the professionals is standing out of thousands of other outstanding players.   Bonds started taking steroids well after he had already established a name for himself.

Then he turned 40.  For those of us who are not there yet, this is what that means for an athlete of Bonds caliber: you no longer roll out of bed easily at 5:30, carbohydrate load, caffeinate and then workout and practice for the rest of the day.  The late 30's is when an athlete's lifetime of wear and tear starts taking a toll.  Bonds resorting to steroids was to continue playing at the level he was.  THis is a testament to how willing he was to keep working just as hard as he had when he first decided to be great at baseball.  His mind was willing but his body just wasn't keeping up the way it used to.  As any athlete would argue, most of your talent comes from the amount of work you put into.  Very little has to do with "innate" abilities.

In an article dated September 6th, 2011, a newspaper, Mail&Guardian, ran an article on ultra marathon runner, Dean Karnazes.  Exercise physiologist, Laurent Messonnier from the University of Savoy in France studied Karnazes and had incredible findings.

One of Karnazes' unique bodily features was specific to his VO2 max, a measure of the amount of oxygen a person can intake and then circulate to their bodily tissue.  The average person has a measure of 45 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. With proper training, 60 is possible. Mr. Karnazes' is 85, an innate and anomalous level.

Messonnier also found Karnazes' lactate levels to be completely abnormal.  Lactate is the acid that fills the muscles during strenuous activity if insufficient oxygen is not delivered.  Lactate can then be shuffled back to the glycolytic cycle to be used for more energy production.  This process, however, is very slow, resulting in acute muscle soreness.  To no surprise, Messonnier found that Karnazes had the lowest recorded lactate levels than any other athlete ever.  Because of his high VO2 max levels and mutant ability to recycle lactate, Karnazes can run longer without pain and recover faster.

The only difference between Bonds and Karnazes is that Karanazes did not need steroids to do what he does.  But if you're going to disqualify someone with an "unnatural" advantage, you have to disqualify someone with a "natural" advantage. You can't get up to the level of Karnazes without genetics.  The Bonds trial is now saying that there are legislators who are allowed to split hairs on the subject.  Advantages, whether they are inherited by natural or synthetic means, are all the same.

Athletes still have to train hard.  Karnazes still has to run from San Francisco to Palo Alto every day to keep up his prowess.  Bonds has to be up at dawn doing snatches and clean and jerks.  Whether they were born with their unique physiology or acquired it is subject to dispute. The uncertainty is whether or not Karnazes was able to acquire this physiology or if he was born with it or if it was a synergistic or epigenetic process.  Even an advantage is genetic or artificially inherited, you won't become great unless you take up the second job of perfecting your craft.  This goes for any profession, not just athletes.

If they're lucky, an athletes’ careers only last until their early forties.  Some gymnasts peak in their late teens.  When a player’s performance starts inevitably going downhill, their paycheck and draft chances follow.  It's not like government where useless employees stay on the payroll just because no one has the hear to fire them. Just like the people at Enron, sports players will cut any corner they can to keep their lifestyle.  Bonds may like baseball, but he ultimately has a wallet he is trying to keep filled. If that means having to take steroids, he will do it.  Anyone would do what Bonds did.  Being one of the greatest players in the history of the sport comes with a lot of pressure.  Age is just a sword of Damocles for everyone but even more so for an athlete.  No one has empathy for Bonds because no one knows what its like to be the best.  Next to that, no one knows what its like to lose that title and to fade into obscurity.

The mindset that athletes like Bonds are desecrating the spirit of baseball is another subject for scrutiny.  Baseball fans think the sport is no longer the apple pie national past-time they like to believe it once was was.  Understand that professional sports is a business.  "Selling out” was news from two centuries ago. To become good at something and get paid for is what we call capitalism, the basis of which America operates.  By association, this is the spirit of American sports.  If you knock "selling out" in baseball, you're really knocking the entire notion of capitalism.  To be betrayed with athletes' steroid use is the same gullibility for those who felt betrayed by the 94-95 Baseball Strike.  News flash: Santa doesn't exist.  Also, athletes aren't infallible and they want a 7 figure paycheck.

To drive this point home harder, in 1997, Mark McGwire outperformed Sammy Sosa for the season's home run count.  But Sosa made more money than McGwire.  This is because Sosa bowed down to more corporate feet and loaded up on more endorsement deals than McGwire.  In 2003, Kobe Bryant endorsed for Nutella, a desert spread that he has probably never eaten.  Before that, Shaquille O’Neil shilled for Pepsi Co. and Michael Jordan for Coca-Cola and its subsidiaries.  The spirit and integrity of baseball already has been hijacked by consumer- and commercialism.  The day someone decided to put sports on TV was the day that the concept of sports for their own sake died.

All Bonds wanted to do was keep playing baseball. The desire in spite of old age is the very baseball spirit that everyone claims he’s destroying.  Playing because you want to play and seizing whatever means to do it is heroic.  Finding ways to continue doing what you love regardless of the internal and external consequences is a devotion most of us have yet to experience.

Retiring because of the cultural views of old age is a nonsensical.  Bonds entered middle age.  This carries many daunting implications for both your body and reputation.  Bodily, your muscle mass starts dropping or becomes harder to maintain and more so to build; your maximal power output and sprinting speed wanes; your midsection starts enlarging; energy levels start decreasing and the mind starts losing its edge.  This is why anyone starts taking steroids who is in organized sports.  Your career depends completely on your physical abilities.  When your physical abilities start to deteriorate, it's a slow and embarrassing road to retirement for an athlete.  To keep his sporting career alive, Bonds turned to steroids.  Even regular men have turned to taking steroids for these exact same reasons.  The loss of the benefits of testosterone is the very reason why synthetic steroids were invented in the first place.  Bonds' T count started dropping and the solution was to start juicing.

Compound this with what we all know about how the general public feels about celebrities who are past their prime.  Think of all the criticism Madonna, Mick Jagger, Hulk Hogan, Meg Ryan, Marissa Tomei and even Michael Jordan received for trying to Weekend at Bernie's their career. For that matter, think of any old celebrity or public figure.  Eventually they all become the butt of old people jokes regardless of how loved, inspirational or revered they were in their prime.

Numbers dictate sports.  People think that steroids make these numbers meaningless.  One of the ongoing arguments is how many home runs were because of Bond's athleticism and not the steroids.  As stated before, Bonds was already a superstar player.  Another aspect to consider in this is the highly nebulous definition of a drug. The FDA defines it "articles other than food that are intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals.” This definition can be construed as basically anything one can put into their body.

Like Bonanza Jellybean said in Tom Robbins’ famous book, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, “every living thing has a chemical composition, and anything that is added to it changes that composition. If you eat a cheeseburger or a Three Musketeers bar, it changes your body chemistry. The kind of food you eat, the kind of air you breathe, can change your mental state. Does that mean you're drugged?"  By the FDA and Tom Robbins, we can rightfully say that hot dogs should now be investigated to see if they may have given Babe Ruth an unfair advantage for his home run records.  After all, he never seemed to go a game without one.

Another clearly defined performance enhancing drug that is still legal in sports is caffeine.  It works as a stimulant by creating a cascade effect that ultimately results in the body's sympathetic nervous system response.  This same mechanism is also why caffeine causes the user to crash later on: the "arousal hormones" that should have been released throughout the day are used up in mere hours.  To address this deficit, one either sleeps to synthesize more hormones or takes more caffeine. Yet it caffeine is only being "closely-monitored" but steroids are banned.

Just like Babe Ruth and his hot dogs, it can never be proven or disproven whether or not steroids even helped Bonds. As stated earlier, no one was interested in Dean Karnazes until he started breaking Guinness World Records for endurance running.  If Bonds had not take steroids and ended up hitting 800 home runs we would be applauding instead of indicting him.  Also stated earlier is to accuse Bonds of cheating is to assume that one can take steroids, not have to work and automatically become a rock start athlete.

Drug effects can vary.  What is detrimental to one person can be advantageous for another.  The assumption that steroids can have nothing but advantageous effects would have been reasonable had it not also been in lieu of another drug scandal that transpired a decade before.

Gary Hall Jr., in 1998 was disqualified from sports for a year after being drug-tested positive for THC, the active chemical in marijuana.  Hall was a world-record holding short distance sprinter in swimming. In 2004, he was the fastest swimmer in the world. His 50 meter freestyle was clocked at 21.76, a speed technically faster than what Michael Phelps in his prime could reach.

When Hall was DQ'd, it was on the grounds that marijuana stands on the same echelon of abuse and effects as steroids.  To name one source, the British  Medical Journal puts cannabis as the least harmful drug anyone can use.  The effects are psychoactive and sympathetic, meaning they induce the "rest and digest" response of the body.  Specifically, cannabis is a depressant.  Lumping cannabis into the same category as steroids puts a major inconsistency in the legislative treatment of drugs in organized sports.  If cannabis can disqualify someone from professional sports, then alcohol should also be grounds.  Yet all Vin Baker ever got was a non-renewed contract for the Rockets.  He was a binge drinker and an Olympic and MVP star.  No one even questioned whether alcohol might have made him into a drunken master on the court.  And Baker is not an isolated incident.    

On personal note, it's easier to destroy than create.  Most of the criticism towards Bonds comes from the armchair philosopher fans.  As if they know what it's like to get up early in the morning to practice batting, train the entire day until sunset in the weight room.  It's a discipline and a type of work that very few people can emulate, let alone empathize with.  Making it to the pros is is a faraway star when you start training as early as your first steps.  Few people can understand and invest, day in and day out, year after year, injury after injury, with nothing more than blind faith and hard work.

Regardless of how many crazed fans will spit vitriol on the contrary, athletes are people. They pass gas, cry, womanize, have bad habits and will - for lack of a better word - cheat by taking performance-enhancing drugs.  But many regular people have and will cheat if their life's calling and purpose are at risk.