Would you encourage or tolerate your son taking steroids to advance his sports career?
There are no holes. Docs are not athletes. Athletes are not docs. An athlete taking a supplement that you or I can also legally buy at GNC but is banned by his boss is not the same as a doc performing surgery on Red Bull and NoDoze. If my son was a pro athlete that is for him to decide based on the rules at that time. I would never want him to cheat, but if enhancements were permitted to assist him then he would have to work with his docs, trainers, etc. to find the healthy protocol. Many advancements have been made in enhancements. My husband uses natural enhancemnts for body building, although he does not compete in the sport. It’s more of a personal goal thing for him. As to your historical reference, I already addressed that. Those buggy whip manufacturers are all dead and we’re still using the internal combustion engine. Bats, batting gloves, shoes, computer training models, etc. make the “historical” argument obsolete.
I stand by my comment that if a substance is not permitted and one is caught using then the rules have been broken and punishment must follow. I’m simply standing by my claim that these substance rules are silly. For each athlete caught there are dozens more still using. It’s like Prohibition or the War on Drugs: Make it illegal and American ingenuity will find a way around it.
“Would you encourage or tolerate your son taking steroids to advance his sports career?”
That’s it right there. Everyone of these players had a father or father figure who mentored him when he was a kid. What father would want his son to grow up and be a drug abuser? It gets right to the heart of the game when our sons end up in an environment where “every one is doing it”. My son is 9 and he loves baseball. Guys like Ryan Braun and A-Roid make me sick. Greedy SOB’s, laughing all the way to the bank.