IB - Sports: Drugs and Steroids

Sports: Drugs and steroids

Actually sports have gained a great importance for the development of human beings in different areas, either social, economic, physically and psychologically. The practice of sports has an influence on physical health. Generally people who do physical exercise are healthier than those who do not  because sports can help to prevent some diseases.however, practising a sport can also be associated with/ lead to unhealthy habits, such as taking drugs.

Unfortunately there are athletes who use drugs to compete. Why do they do this? According to the Mayo Clinic Staff, that is a nonprofit medical research group based in Rochester, Minnesota ,  “the most serious athletes often pursue dreams of winning a medal for their country or securing a spot on a professional team. In such environment, the use of performance-enhancing drugs has become increasingly common. But using performance-enhancing drugs — , doping — isn't without risks”. In conclusion, athletes use drugs to have a better performance. The Mayo Clinic is the first and largest integrated nonprofit medical group in the world, employing more than 3800 physicians and scientists.

Which drugs are used by athletes to improve their performance? Some athletes take steroids. “Besides making muscles bigger, steroids may help athletes recover from a hard workout more quickly by reducing the muscle damage that occurs during the session. This enables athletes to work out harder and more frequently without overtraining.” These are words from the Mayo Clinic Staff too.

Like any other drug used in excess, steroids also have health consequences. Steroids abuse interrupt the normal production of hormones in the body, causing infertility, breast development or baldness for example. Steroids abuse is always associated with cardiovascular diseases, like heart attacks.

The use of steroids have risks for men and also for women.

Specific risks for mens include:

• testicular shrinkage
• pain when urinating
• breast development
• impotence (inability to get an erection)
• reduced sperm count and infertility

    Specific risks for women associated with anabolic steroids include:

• increased facial and body hair growth

• development of masculine traits, such as deepening of the voice, and loss of feminine body characteristics, such as shrinking of the breasts
• enlargement of the clitoris
• menstrual cycle change.

Steroids use in Sports statistics:

          1. 85%. That’s the percentage of teen athletes who do not receive any education about what the side effects of steroids happen to be.

2. 44% of teens say that it is very or fairly easy for them to obtain steroids even though they don’t have a doctor’s prescription for them.

3. 4 out of 10 teens who use steroids say that their decision to pursue the performance enhancing drugs was inspired by professional athletes who are taking them.

4. The percentage of teen steroid users who say they felt like they needed to take the drugs because of images they saw in muscle magazines: 57%.

5. 11% of high school boys say that they’ve tried using steroids at least once in order to gain an edge in their preferred sport.

6. For athletes that do decide to take steroids on a regular basis, 80% of them show some form of biochemical abnormalities of the liver during medical testing.

7. Aggression and irritability are 56% more likely to happen when an athlete is taking steroids compared to when they are not.

8. Possessing illegal steroids for a first time offender in the United States can result in 1 year in prison and a $1k fine as a maximum punishment.

9. As many as 1,084,000 Americans, or 0.5% of the adult population, said that they had used anabolic steroids.

10. The maximum penalty for trafficking is five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 if this is the individual’s first felony drug offense.

11. Adults in the 18-34 age demographic are twice as likely to have used steroids when compared to the general population.

12. In 2002, 4% of high school seniors said that they had tried steroids at least once. Since 1991, teens are 10x more likely to use steroids today than they were in the past.

13. More than 57% of twelfth graders reported that using steroids was a “great risk.”

14. A majority of the studies performed on steroid abuse indicate males are twice as likely to abuse steroids as females.

15. More than 50 types of anabolic androgenic steroids are currently available for athletes to take today and there are 30 additional stimulants to use in combination with them.

16. In 2003, more than 30 elite athletes, including Olympian Marion Jones and baseball players Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield, testified before a grand jury investigating the use of an “undetectable” steroid being distributed by the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative.

17. Since 1991, 20% of teens have stopped seeing the use of steroids as something that has a great risk associated with it.

18. Among those who admit using steroids, 80 percent said they believed the drugs could help them achieve their athletic dreams

19. 57% of users said they would use steroids even if it could shorten their lives

20. 60% of people who use steroids believe that taking steroids is a right of the modern professional athlete.

In conclusion, international competitions will be always related with drugs and steroids, that benefit the athlete for having a better performance. I personally do Sport, I started playing rugby when I was 4 years. Actually I have 17 years and I never take any sports supplement.  For me it is not necessary to use drugs to have a better level. Healthiest way to improve your own performance is training. Training hard to achieve your objectives.