I’m sorry, but this does not seem to be anything at all like the original position you espoused. Besides, all the introspective musing in the world won’t allow you to escape the final question: Who gets to decide?
And when it comes to whether you can take athletic achievement seriously with or without steroids or whatever else, is a matter for you, and not for anyone else. Others can make up their own minds. Bottom line is, frankly, I don’t care, and I hope millions more don’t care either. Because, all this “caring” is leading us toward a society where long-nosed busybodies make more and more decisions that ought to be ours alone. Maybe I might want to take steroids - or maybe not. But I don’t want that decision left to the LLiC - that’s the “Local Libtard in Charge”. They have already started tagging non-steroids as steroids just to get them banned. This is what Fascists do.
Finally: “Steroids were not available, or not in the current form, forty years ago and more. So you have athletes today setting records they might not have come close to without steroid use.”
So what? The same thing will be true in another 40 years - when whatever performance enhancing substances have been developed in the meantime are matters for this unhealthy public “caring”. And as I said before, they are on the way, faster than you might think.
Finally.... I ascertain that you don't care what athletes take and how it affects their performance. At least we've cleared that up. For the record, I do care. Especially if some substance or substances allows average athletes to surpass records set by superior athletes.