By John Chidley-Hill
Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he took performance enhancing drugs from 2001-2004 is the climax of a saga that has tainted not just baseball, but all sports. It’s a story that baseball fans have been unable to avoid.
Players implicated through confessions, tell-all books, and investigations led by the United States Congress and the sports media.
The rise of steroids started with the Cold War, as Soviet countries tried to win the ideological battle in international competition. The leading nation in this arms race was East Germany. Sports boss Manfred Ewald and his medical director Manfred Hoeppner implemented what a German court later described as “systematic and overall doping in (East German) competitive sports “Thousands of East German athletes had been given performance-enhancing drugs, often without the knowledge or consent of the athletes.
The success of the East German teams created a domino effect through international sport, culminating in Canada’s Ben Johnson stripped of his gold medal after setting a world record in the 100-metre dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Although steroids and amphetamines had been used intermittently in professional sports, they took off in the 1990s. The 1994 baseball season ended early due to union unrest, and when baseball returned in 1995, attendance was at an all-time low. Apparently, to turn around attendance, players turned to steroids to improve the spectacle of the game.
In 1998, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa launched an assault on Roger Maris’ 37-year-old record of 61 home runs in a single season. By the end of the season both had surpassed the milestone, with McGwire hitting 70 home runs, and capturing the new record.
To keep up with the proverbial Joneses, steroids became rampant in baseball. In 2002, Ken Caminiti told Sports Illustrated that during his 1996 MVP season he used performance-enhancing drugs. Two years later, he died from “acute intoxication due to the combined effects of cocaine and opiates,” as well as coronary artery disease and an enlarged heart from prolonged steroid use. In his 2005 memoir Juiced Jose Canseco admitted to using anabolic steroids for several seasons and implicated several former teammates. These two confessions sparked an investigation by both the media and by Congress in to the issue.
It is this dragnet that has caught the biggest fish of them all: Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez had been the last hope of baseball fans: a player of such pure talent that, presumably, he would never have to cheat. Now, even that faint flicker of legitimacy has been snuffed out.
No records in professional or amateur sport in the past thirty years are above suspicion. A scandal that has been building since the Cold War has come to a head, allowing American and international legislators to strike at a steroid epidemic that has decayed the core of professional and amateur sport.
Thanks to baseball and athletics, all sports can now begin a real process of redemption as they clean up their athletes and their public image.