Ever since the beginning of the athletic competition, competitors have been searching for any means to get an advantage on their opponents. This usually included working out harder and training more often than everyone else. With advancements in medicine, came the advent of the steroid. This magical little medicine has given many athletes and illegal leg up on their competition in just about every sport, most notably in baseball, cycling, and track and field.
Being caught taking steroids has derailed the professional sports careers of many athletes. Some of these stories captured the headlines and moved into the mainstream media. The following are five examples of some of the biggest athletes who used steroids.
1. Roger Clemens – Like other great baseball players before him, he hailed from the state of Texas. He was one of the best pitchers in the league in the 80s and 90s until he started to decline. As he started to age, Clemens decided he needed some help and started taking performance enhancing drugs.
He was named in the Jose Canseco book “Juiced” as one of his baseball playing friends that had knowledge of steroids. He was also named in the famous “Mitchell Report” on steroids over 80 times. Clemens has never admitted to using the drugs, even going so far as to lie about it under oath and be convicted of perjury.
2. Chris Benoit – Benoit was one of the most successful and famous professional wrestlers of time. Steroids are widely used in the sport of wrestling because there are no real regulations against them. The steroids had an adverse effect on the mental condition of Benoit, leading to him murdering his wife, young son, and himself in 2007 in his home state of Georgia. Specialists say the treatment he was using to combat his years of steroid use were the cause of his breakdown, not the steroids themselves.
3. Marion Jones – This is the most famous example of a female athlete consuming steroids. She was once considered the fastest woman in the world. She denied rumors for years until it just became too obvious. She admitted to the use. She was sentenced to obstruction of justice for lying about her steroid use. This resulted in her having all of her Olympic medals taken away, and spending six months in federal prison.
4. Barry Bonds – many baseball fans found Bonds huge gains in muscle mass to be very suspicious when he moved from the Pittsburgh Pirates to the San Francisco Giants. He then set the all-time record for home runs in a season with 73. Like many of his steroid using counterparts, he was convicted of perjury in federal court. This resulted in hefty fines and the complete destruction of his public image.
5. Jose Canseco – Jose might be the most hated man in baseball by his fellow players and former players. He wrote a tell-all book about steroids in baseball and outed many other players that had been using, including former bash brother teammate Mark McGwire. His book “Juiced” is the most important look into steroid use in the professional sports ever written. Of course, he admitted to his own use of the drugs in the book. This only added to validity of his claim that the others ingested them as well.
