Performance Enhancement: Drop The Guilt and Bring It On.

I have no problem with performance enhancing substances in sports. Any sports.

There. I’ve said it, and boy does it feel good to have that off my chest.

How can I make such an outrageous statement? How dare I set my opinion against one of our sacred cows, our great sporting bogeyman? Pretty easily actually.

My opinion developed many years ago when I was playing excellent baseball in Canada and generating interest from professional scouts.

It was made clear to me when I was only 15 or 16—through very careful implication because no one would actually say the word—that if I wanted to make it to the big leagues I had to bulk up, juice up, drug up, take steroids.

I fought with the idea for a couple of years, watching people around me take them and make massive strides. And I very nearly took them myself. I can admit now that, in fact, I would have taken them if chance had not intervened.

You see, I was a catcher. But I have leg perthes, a degenerative bone disease of the hips and legs that will cause my hip joints to come apart once the bone deteriorates beyond the hip’s ability to stay in its socket.

If I had gone on to play ball I would have sped up the deterioration and lost my hips about a decade ago, cutting my career incredibly short and hastening the need for plastic hips.

But I never had to make the decision to hasten my hip collapse, nor to take steroids.

When the scouts discovered I had leg perthes, I was off the list. I was too great a risk for investment, and I wasn’t “so good” that the risk was worth taking.

So baseball slipped away from me, and I never took steroids.

But I would have. Yes. I absolutely would have.

We all know about the risks of taking steroids. Even back then I was aware of the effects it could have on my body, both positive and negative, but risks be damned.

People take risks everyday, and with nowhere near the payoff the risk of performance enhancing drugs gives athletes.

In the U.S., you may avoid taking steroids because if something goes wrong you wouldn’t be able to afford the medical care needed to keep you alive and functioning healthily. But if you are an athlete who is good enough to become pro you are also likely to be willing to take risks. It comes with the territory, and if you succeed as an athlete your multi-millionaire status makes medical bills entirely irrelevant.

Elsewhere in the world, medical concerns are less important and the medical risk is nowhere near as great. Most everywhere that has professional sport outside the U.S. also has nationalized health care. You don’t have to pay for care. The state gives it to you. So why not take the risk? If you succeed in sport it can change your life, the lives of your family and children, and give you a living doing something you love.

And if you don't succeed, the state will still pay for your dialysis.

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