Steroids, Sports and the Ethics of Winning

The use of anabolic steroids increases the athlete's chance of getting liver cancer. Heavy or prolonged use can cause psychological and emotional problems—so-called "steroid rage."Steroids enable heavy lifting, tendon tears and osteoarthritis are common ailments. Why do people use them? The answer to that question is also straightforward. They make you bigger, faster, and stronger. And they work perfectly well in anybody who's training heavily.Society cares because steroid use is a form of cheating. Since steroids work so well, they create an unfair advantage for those who take them, and this breaks the social contract athletes have implicitly agreed to: We are going to have a fair contest. Steroids are still ubiquitous, and one of the problems is that we let people use them. Steroid use is part of this whole youthful delusion that says, "If I just do this for a period of my life, I'll be fine. I'll smoke until I'm older; I'll only binge drink in college; I'll be anorexic or bulimic so I can run, and then I'll stop being that way and I'll go on and have a wonderful life."The only things that work to discourage doping are testing and penalties. You can talk about personal responsibility until you're blue in the face, but to stop steroid use, testing is necessary. Cocaine and steroids have ceased to be big problems in professional football because of testing.

Sources : www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/ethicalperspectives/steroids-ethics.html

Date : 25 August 2004

Written by : Michael Dillingham, team physician for the San Francisco 49ers and Santa Clara University

Ethics in Sports (Media)

In today's world of sports, media is a very important element.It also is the focus of one of the most discussed issues of ethics.In the USA, the clubs have commentators for TV and radio, whose comments are based on their knowledge about a specific club or its players. In the early stages of professional sports in my part of the world, it was considered immoral and unheard-of for a media member to announce that he or she was supporting a certain club. After one of the famous journalists started attending the games wearing the colors of the team he supported, and even wrote a book confirming his support, journalists and commentators began to feel there was no harm in publicly declaring their support for a given team. I believe this is more ethical.Another issue frequently encountered in my part of the world is the occasions where a journalist affiliated with a publication travels with a certain club or team, and where this trip is paid in full by the club instead of the journalist's publisher. Other times managers of a club or sports organization might write the columns in publications.

Sources : www.ethics.org/resources/articles-general-ethics.