Ped's

9 Pages 2190 Words

sing steroids since the 1970’s. Who can forget the way the East Germans used steroids in the 1970 Olympics in Belgium to dominate their opponents and to obtain glory in women’s swimming? This was one of the first times people saw high-class athletes using a substance that gave them the competitive edge. After that sports would never be the same from then on sports officials had to come up with rules for athletes off the field as well as on the field. Screening athletes would become just as important as controlling them on the field.
Even other levels of sports had to start establishing rules because they knew that they were dealing with an evil that would crawl its way down the metaphoric ladder of sports hierarchy. Meaning to say once professional athletes saw the world’s greatest Olympic athletes using steroids they would see the need to begin using. When it became public knowledge that professional athletes were using steroids to get an edge, then college athletes would see a need to use steroids. Either to get an edge at the college level or to help elevate them so they could obtain their dreams of playing at the professional level. The Olympics unleashed an avalanche of steroid use that would eventually make it down to the high school level to children as young as 15 using steroids to help them get to the collegiate level.
It seems that each level that steroids polluted, the bodies that governed these levels were always one step behind. In 1985 the magazine Physician and Sports Medicine revealed that 4 percent of student athletes in five men’s sports (football, basketball, baseball, track and field, tennis) and five women’s sports (swimming and diving, basketball, softball, track and field and tennis) tested positive for steroid use. At this time there was not a NCAA rule that tested student athletes for steroid use. However at this time the discussion for the n...