Over the edge

A detailed Summary of Over the edge

In the brutal cutthroat world of modern sports where athletes are in demand for excellence, athletes have been forced to find alternative means to improve their performance. Today, athletes often face a choice whether to use drugs to enhance their performance or to accept what could amount to a handicap. It is a choice that carries significant moral consideration, as currently, the use of performance enhancing drugs is banned from Olympic competition. Should athletes be allowed to make the choice of whether or not to use these drugs themselves?

Anabolic steroids are a group of drugs used as a chemical short cut to developing a more muscular looking body. They are a synthetic or laboratory made form of the natural male hormone testosterone. Anabolic means "tissue building." Many athletes use steroids to build up muscles quickly. In reading the article "Over the Edge" by Bamberger and Yaeger (1997) they discuss the use of performance enhancing drugs used by Olympians. The authors detailed the widespread and effective use of performance-enhancing drugs used by Olympic athletes in the past decade. It explains how athletes will go to great lengths to do almost anything to gain the competitive edge in these competitions a

nd even risk death by doing so. Now days, it is more likely for one of a team's star player to show up at the beginning of the upcoming season with an extra solid 20 pounds of muscle as a result of taking drugs in the off-season. It goes into great detail about the 2.5 million-dollar effort towards drug testing at the 1996 Olympics games in Atlanta. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) introduced a new piece of equipment, a High-Resolution Mass Spectrometer, for the games. The funny thing was it found five positive tests for anabolic steroids. Were the athletes disqualified? The athletes were not disqualified because the tests might not hold up in court, as the machine was "relatively untested" (Bamberger &Yaeger, 1997, p.60-70).

Overall, the article is a little long on talking about the way the testing is conducted. It is an honest look at the world on sports. I like most of the quotes from the reading. The one I enjoy is from Kooman, "All athletes someday have to choose: Do I want to compete at a world-class level and take drugs, or do I want to compete at a club level and be clean?" (1997, p.60-70) This piece is great because it is often reality. This is what athletes are faced with everyday especially in sports such as sprinting, weightlifting, or gymnastics. I think athletes in these sports are faced more with whether or not to turn to drugs, as

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Approximate Word count = 930
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous