Also....if you are blasting baseball for steroids, have you seen Serena lately?
you are not the only one who has wondered about her physique. but like i said, i don't even follow the women's game because it is so unevolved compared to the men's game (i could give you another 1500 word post explaining why but i'm sure we'd both rather not go there...).
because i don't follow the women's game much, i am not sure how closely their governing body--the Women's Tennis Association (WTA)--monitors for substance abuse.
the men's game is governed by a totally different entity: the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). the ATP does monitor for substance abuse. i think they follow the IOC rules among other things. active players using steroids have been caught in the past and suspended for appreciable lengths of time. one of them who has recently made a strong comeback is Juan Ignacio Chela of Argentina atptour.com
for some reason, there are a lot of strong players from Argentina, and from South America generally. e.g., there are 4 Argentinians in the top 21, compared to only 3 Americans (two of whom are over 30 and are close to the ends of their careers).
(some have speculated that the incredible amount of talent from South America reflects the difficult conditions in many of those countries, which gives people a lot of incentive on the tour, where conditions are incredibly tough. in fact, there are strong players from all sorts of messed up countries, like Russia and former Soviet-bloc countries.)
in any case, the use of steroids in men's tennis, to the extent that it exists, would not be to become beefcake, but to achieve faster recovery times since there is basically no off season in tennis. the load on the body is tremendous, and many promising players are sidelined in their prime. viz., Kuerten, who was the dominant claycourt player before suffering hip trouble (he had hip surgery in Tennessee last year) and isn't quite up to his old stuff. and Moya (now in the top 10) was out of sorts for a couple years due to back trouble or something after hitting number 1 in his very early 20s.
so while Serena may appear incredibly muscular compared to the other women, she is also incredibly muscular compared to 99% of the guys as well. something tells me that if anabolic steroids were really that common on the men's tour, Serena wouldn't make all the men look like the stick figures they are (if you follow the Chela link, you'll see that free of steroids, he's now 6'3", 165 lbs, which is exactly the same as Kuerten when he was number 1 in the world). and as i mentioned, Hewitt is 5'11" and a whopping 150 lbs. quite a difference from the NFL, where the average team today has 11 players weighing over 300 lbs (compared to only two or three prior to 1987, when the NFL's "steroid policing" joke was introduced).
but just because tennis players are clearly better athletes than American football players doesn't mean they're any more moral. i'm sure they'd use steroids if they could without getting caught and if it made a difference. but based on their physiques, it doesn't seem like it makes a difference (at least the eye-catching kind). and obviously you don't need to be a muscle man to hit the ball hard.
probably the drug issues for men tennis players are more in line with those confronting cyclists and other endurance athletes than those confronting conventional American-sport athletes. the ATP has announced plans to test for EPO, for example. insidedenver.com
perhaps the stereotypical steroid "beefcaking" might be more advantageous in women's tennis, because it is still at a point in its evolution where the dominant players win in large part because they are physically stronger than everybody else. |
