Why Bodybuilding Has the Steroid “Problem” Solved

By Joe Pietaro
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Updated: February 23, 2009

While baseball gets dragged through the mud and takes all the other sports down with it, bodybuilding has gone about its business and continues to thrive. As soon as the National Pastime decided to rid the game of anabolic steroids on the public forum, the attention spread to everything from football to…cheerleading, believe it or not.

Like it or not, athletes have been looking for an advantage since the original Olympic games in Ancient Greece. Since the 1950s, one of those advantages has been steroids and the use of performance-enhancing drugs has been a part of the sports landscape ever since.

Of course, bodybuilding has been synonymous with steroids and the use of them has been a fairly obvious fact since the 1970s. Yes, there are ‘natural’ competitions, but for the most part you cannot gain the type of muscle mass needed to win without using steroids. Let’s not lose sight of that and also understand that the sport has gone to different heights because of it.

The Mr. Olympia contest went from a small show held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1965 to an entire weekend full of everything Las Vegas has to offer. The competitors have gone from muscular to humongous and have graduated from only using steroids to implementing human growth hormone and insulin into their programs.

The late Ben Weider tried for years to get bodybuilding into the Olympics and even came close, but the International Olympic Committee because of the stringent drug testing consistently shot down the idea involved.

Instead of running away from the subject and looking foolish trying to deny it, bodybuilding has simply plodded along and doesn’t seem to be any worse for wear because of it.

All the while, baseball players have spent more time testifying in front of grand juries and Congress and speaking to investigators and the media about steroids than they have taking cuts during batting practice.

Getting back to the games is what the fans want to see instead of federal investigations. So far, it seems like bodybuilders are the only athletes not affected by all of this nonsense negative attention.

Who would have ever guessed that?