When thinking back on my own personal experience with sports, I have come to the conclusion that I have never sacrificed ethics for an athletic victory, nor have I witnessed any of my teammates behave in an unethical way. Perhaps I can attribute this to the nature of the sports I have played. I have individually competed in sailing races and tennis tournaments throughout high school and have also participated in the team sports of field hockey and lacrosse. In all those years, I mostly remember how much sportsmanship was preached to me. My coaches would not tolerate unsportsmanlike conduct and made sure that we always displayed kind behavior throughout all competitions. I may not have experienced unethical behavior first-hand, but I do know that it exists in the realm of sports. Even from just playing board games against my sister, I know that nothing makes me madder then when someone cheats. I am a firm believer that no one should cheat to gain an unfair advantage.
When I think of MLB, I automatically think of steroids.
World-wide, in competitive sports, I am most annoyed by the amount of steroid usage that is present. Athletic competitions these days are plagued by the use of steroids, which is cheating, plain and simple. Due to the highly competitive nature of most sports, athletes often lose sight of their own values and become ruthless to do whatever it takes to win. So much pressure is placed on athletes to perform the best, which makes steroids look pretty enticing to them. Steroids may seem like the easy way out, especially if the punishment for taking the drugs isn’t that severe or strictly enforced. Steroids give athletes an unfair advantage over their competitors and disrupt the natural status quo of sport victories.
Professional athletes are role models for so many people. They are admired based on their achievements. Young people who are just starting up their sports careers look up to these athletes and may not think that the drug is that bad if their role model is taking it. This can be damaging to society as a whole. In addition, I should still mention the destructive damage that these drugs do to the natural growth of the body.
The unethical use of steroids in sports is very similar to unethical practices in business. Athletes that use steroids fall victim to the mistake of short-termism thinking. Sure, if you take steroids, in the short term you will experience agreeable results. It is the easy option to achieve your immediate goals of perhaps gaining muscle, or getting bigger or stronger. However, it is important for these athletes to not lose sight of the long run. Steroids are damaging to not only the athletes but also to society. The same is true for companies that focus on short-termism—companies that do anything to raise their stock price and manipulate their balance sheet to look good for investors. Taking steroids is equivalent to not disclosing something in your balance sheet. Athletes, as well as companies, need to be honest. We need to level the playing field so that no one feels the pressure to take these terrible performance enhancing drugs that should be eliminated from all sports.
Read this and hack! 
Hey Meg,
If you get a change to read my post it essentially since the exact opposite. This is clearly attributed to our experiences in sports but also the sports that we have played which definitively great affects how we have played. When I was writing my post I was thinking about how unethically I have behaved when playing soccer, basketball, and Rugby. However, after reading your post it made me think about when I played tennis in high school. I was new to tennis in high school and I definitely experienced a learning curve in terms of how ethically and morally sound everyone is. However, this is not to say I have never been playing an opponent who has called a ball out that was clearly in, probably one of the most frustrating things that can happen in tennis. Do think morals can be result of the different rules and regulations associated with different sports or do you think that morals and ethics are universal to all sports?
With steroids and sports, the first thing that comes to people’s minds is baseball. When you think of steroids and baseball, one of the first people everyone thinks of is all-time home run champion Barry Bonds. Now, it’s never been officially proven, but people know he took PED’s. What a lot of people don’t know is that most baseball analysts would still call him one of the greatest hitters of all time. Now why is that? Because most people who play and understand the game of baseball recognize that hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things to do in sports. And when your career and your life revolve around a sport, you will do whatever it takes to play and play as long as possible. Andy Pettite, pitcher for the New York Yankees, came out with a few years ago that he used PED’s, but not to get stronger, but to heal faster. Is that still cheating? When your career and life are on the line and everyone is know on PED’s, it gets to the point where you need them if you want to keep playing. That’s why baseball is now known as the Steroid Era.
Jackson, you’ve made some really nice points. I realize that to these athletes, baseball is their life, it’s their career, and it’s their everything. They would do anything they could to prolong their time playing the game because it is all they know. They take the steroids just to get on the same playing field as their competitors. I just wish these drugs didn’t exist at all. If no one took a performance enhancing drug then no one else would feel like they needed to take them either. In an ideal world, athletes would be able to play the sport that they love without having to damage their bodies at the same time.