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Why Do Athletes Use Steroids In Sports

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Athletes enhancing their performance are common in sports today. Headlines seem to pop up every month about athletes doping across various sports. Through the use of injections or pills, the use of drugs in sports goes back almost to the invention of the concept of sports. Sports like wrestling, soccer, American football and cycling are among the many sports that are influenced by doping. These performance enhancing drugs make the body produce more red blood cells and only last for a short period of time, contrasting to the regular steroid. These drugs allow the athlete to obtain more oxygen into their system – enhancing their performance for a few hours before returning to their normal state. More and more athletes are doping, with Lance Armstrong …show more content…
In order for sports to be fair, everyone has to be on the same playing field. When performance enhancing drugs are being used, it is a competitive disadvantage to every player who isn’t doping. Raymmar Tirado of Huffington Post claims that “We love drugs. Especially the ones we're not allowed to have” (Tirado, 2014, para. 15) which is a false statement in today’s society. Only a small percent of North America uses drugs; everyone would be using drugs if “we love drugs”. This can also apply to sports. If every athlete decided to do drugs, everyone would be on the same playing field. Since the majority of athletes choose not to do drugs, it is unfair to those who don’t want to enhance their performance. These clean athletes would rather play fairly and lose compared to doping and winning. Performance enhancing drugs have been illegal in sports for an extremely long time and with good reason. It violates the rules of the sport and we have seen many medals and awards get stripped from athletes who dope. Cheating isn’t ethical and corrupt as it when the athlete is knowledgeable about what he/she is doing; making the deliberate advantage

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