According to the Mitchell Report, which you can download here, 70+ current MLB players were juicing, and probably many others. While we all knew this day was coming (and it's a sad day), I stumbled upon something else that's related and very surprising: There are illegal steroids and stimulants in the "legal" supplements that professional and amateur athletes commonly take.
According to a study overseen by non-profit coalition Informed-Choice, and conducted by HFL, one quarter of dietary supplements purchased in a recent sampling contained traces of steroids and 11.5 percent had banned stimulants.
This comes five years after five years after an International Olympic Committee study that sampled 240 supplements purchased in America and found 18.8 percent of them contained steroids. The full article from the Denver Post is here.
This is pretty shocking, and I'm kind of surprised I never heard anything about this earlier. While I doubt most people who test positive for steroids do so because of accidental tests from supplement contamination, there's got to have been cases of this. One that immediately comes to mind could be the UFC's Sean Sherk, who by most accounts is a great person and has steadfastly denied taking anything illegal, even though he tested positive. But I guess you never know...
Hopefully professional sports will be able to get past steroids and move on. I personally think it's much more important to focus on the future than the past, and that we'll never really know the full story. There will always be cheaters and people who try to get around the law and take the easy way out; that's just reality, and this transcends sports. Not that this makes it OK.
What is everyone's take on all of this?