If you have known very little about golf, you would think that it is an old-people’s sport. But, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Golf is a strenuous sport that puts a lot of stress on both the body and the mind. To be a professional golf player, you need to devote much of your life to being in top shape in order to be among the best.
Sadly, a lot of professional golf players take a shortcut to get there. This shortcut is called doping. The majority of people would think that doping has no place and no use in golf, but that’s not the case. It is one of the biggest threats of fair sports today, so it has not missed this noble game either. Golfers use different prohibited doping drugs and do it to achieve various results.
How Can Doping Help a Golfer?
A golf player needs both power and technique to become a professional. Power is required to hit the ball as hard as you can and get it as close as possible to the hole in one hit. To do this, you need to have a formidable swing, but technique is necessary as well. However, if you’re a scrawny guy that has never lifted in his life, it’s unlikely that you will be able to do it. Therefore, you need to pack on some muscle.
Gaining muscle mass takes a lot of time, which many people do not have. Some have it, but are too impatient. Therefore, the logical solution for them is to turn to steroids for help. Packing on 10 kg of lean muscle can take years without performance enhancing drugs. With steroids, you can do it in a year or less if you follow a proper dietary and fitness regime.
So, if one golfer resorts to steroids to gain an advantage over his competition and does not get caught, what stops others to follow suit?
The Golf Officials Do Not Care
While in most other sports serious measures are taken by officials to prevent and punish doping, the situation is a bit more lenient in golf. For example, the famous professional golfer John Daly has accused the officials of not trying enough to stop doping.
He said that players have been aware most of the time of when the “surprise” drug tests would take place, so they could prepare appropriately. He added that the whole drug testing procedure in golf is a big joke and needed a big revamp. Moreover, PGA Tour’s list of banned substances lacks some entries listed in WADA’s, which is a huge problem as well.
