It’s tough to say exactly when performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports first entered public consciousness.
There’s the home run chase of 1998, which, in retrospect, appears to have been between one admitted steroid user (Mark McGwire) and one suspected steroid user (Sammy Sosa).
Then there’s the early fall of 2001, when a 37-year-old Barry Bonds broke the single-season home run record set by McGwire three years earlier.
Then in 2002, the federal government began its investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). And although Bonds and Jason Giambi were suspected in the investigation, it was too early to say that either player was guilty.
Maybe the day the public became aware that baseball players were doping came in early 2004 when the San Francisco Chronicle acquired and published Giambi’s testimony to a federal grand jury in which he admitted PED use.
But one player admitting use of anabolic steroids was not enough for the public to understand the extent to which baseball players were doping.
In 2006, former Major League Baseball outfielder Jose Canseco published Juiced, a book in which he detailed his own anabolic steroid and human growth hormone (HGH) use.
He also implicated former teammates and acquaintances like McGwire, Miguel Tejada and Magglio Ordoñez. But Canseco was vilified in the press and people were very slow to accept what he had to say.
Then the public was forced to accept what had for over a decade been a poorly kept secret:
On Dec. 13, 2007, U.S. Senator George J. Mitchell (D-ME) released a 409-page exposé of MLB players’ use of illegal PEDs that we now know informally as the “Mitchell Report,” a result of Mitchell’s 21-month investigaton. In the report, Mitchell identified by name 89 current and former MLB players.
And here we are, seven years later, still trying to sort out who did and who did not use anabolic steroids and/or HGH.
Alex Rodriguez and 12 other baseball players were suspended during the 2013 season for involvement with Biogenesis, a Miami-based “anti-aging clinic.”
While the other 12 were slapped with 50-game suspensions, Rodriguez incurred a 211-game suspension, which he promptly appealed.
An arbitrator reduced A-Rod’s suspension early this year to the full 2014 season (162 regular season games and all potential playoff games). Rodriguez says he will continue to fight the process.
The Baseball Writers Association of America has made it clear with their voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame that they plan to keep even those players who are just suspected of steroid use out of the Hall.
Only three players were elected in the 2014 voting with the minimum 75% of the vote. Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas will be enshrined this year, but perhaps more important are the people who were not allowed in.
By the numbers, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds should have been first-ballot Hall of Famers. However, in their second year on the ballot, the two received 35.4% and 34.7% of the vote, respectively.
Even more telling may be the voting for Rafael Palmeiro, he of the 3,020 base hits and 569 home runs in his career—two statistics that used to mean almost automatic election to the Hall of Fame. He received so little of the vote this year (4.4%) that he is not eligible for future elections.
And baseball is by no stretch of the imagination the only sport that was (is?) plagued by PED use.
Cyclist Lance Armstrong had vehemently denied any PED use since the first allegation. However, in 2013, only after he had been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, he admitted to doping.
In football, it is rare to see a player suspended for PED use, but that does not mean that it does not occur.
Take Brian Cushing, the 2009 NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year, who sat out the first four games of the Houston Texans’ 2010 season after testing positive for a fertility drug used as a masking agent for anabolic steroids.
He did not test positive for PEDs. Rather, Cushing was only ever officially implicated because he used another substance to cover up his alleged steroid use.
The fact remains that athletes in most major professional sports have used and likely still do use drugs to enhance their performance.
Regardless of when PED use among professional athletes entered the public consciousness, it remains there today. And it shows no signs of leaving anytime soon.
Tim Carroll
Senior Sports Editor
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