The Perfect Athlete

By: Dan Schultz

Edited by: Noah Shepardson and Trisha VanKoughnett

Roger Clemens, one of Major League Baseball’s most touted pitchers, never expected to be the one swinging – and missing. His former personal trainer admitted Clemens’ use of anabolic steroids in a case that went to Capitol Hill Wednesday; a confession that Clemens adamantly denies.

Regardless, in a world where athletes are put on such a high pedestal, what does this kind of image do for college athletes? These athletes may be willing to do anything to compete on a professional level. After all, they already do it in the big leagues.

“Look at all the money in the game,” former major leaguer Ken Caminiti said in an interview with Sports Illustrated. “A kid got $252 million. So I can’t say, ‘Don’t do it,’ not when the guy next to you is as big as a house and he’s going to take your job and money.”

Role models were never like this before.

“It’s dangerous when yet another glitzy athlete admits to abusing steroids,” Daniel Sturgeon said. Sturgeon, a graduate student at Central Michigan University, has studied the history of baseball and the effects steroids has on it.

“Steroids has been around for a lot longer than people care to know, yet it’s just now taking a hold of younger athletes, like college kids.”

And he’s right.

Research by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has been scarce when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs on the collegiate level. However, NIDA is careful to note that “hundreds of thousands of people aged 18 and older abuse anabolic steroids at least once a year.”

NIDA first assessed the ever-increasing risk of anabolic steroid use in Dec. 1999, and since then has implemented countless programs and experiments to stop any drug abuse found in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

Reasons for drug abuse in the NCAA sometimes have nothing to do with sports, but rather with self-defense and years of sexual abuse.

NIDA reported in a series of interviews that 25 percent of male weightlifters that abused steroids reported memories of childhood physical or sexual abuse. Those that did not abuse steroids reported no such physical or sexual abuse.

Moreover, almost all female weightlifters who had been sexually abused in the past reported that they “markedly increased” their bodybuilding activities after the attack. They believed they would “discourage further attacks because men would find them either intimidating or unattractive.”

“That’s another thing,” Sturgeon said, readjusting his glasses and taking a deep breath. “Some people think they need steroids… they see pro athletes doubling in size, and that’s what entices them.”

There is nothing enticing about steroids, though in the end. An athlete may think they are improving their abilities when they throw performance-enhancing drugs into their career, but they are in fact throwing their career away at the same time.