Steroids ain't cool...

[Ramu Mutt]

Do you follow baseball?

Most desis I know don't. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But I enjoy the occassional baseball game and remember watching most matches of a World Series a few years ago. I think Anaheim won that one.

But if you are, indeed, a fan of the sport or sports in general you surely must have heard of the terrible steroids controversy that is ripping the baseball scene apart.

Like cycling, baseball has seen big, big names enveloped in a steroids scandal. The game, in fact, has lost credibility altogether. When Barry Bonds broke the career home run record in August this year many many fans refused to accept his achievement. Bonds was one of the athletes tainted by the scandal.

Now the case has taken a turn for the worse with the Mitchell Report being published. The report names 78 players, former and current, as potential druggies. The list includes several MVP and All-Stars.

Baseball struggles to manage the fall out.

What really scares me is the possibility that such performance enhancing drug abuse, especially with designer drugs that are sometimes possible to trace, could be rampant in other sports as well. What about athletics? Football? Cricket?

We can safely assume that the greater the benefits, in wealth and fame, there is to be achieved in a sport the greater is the tendency to take the short cut to achieve them.

God forbid that we find that one of the cricket greats has been taking a little help from small glass bottles.

What do you think of the scandal? How do weed this problem out? Legal action? Should doping be a criminal offence? Should the incentive to dope be managed in some way?

Think about it and tell us.