Can the stars still shine for Alex and Michael?

Michael is the biggest Olympic star and Alex is the biggest baseball star.

Both have in part been running around town, Alex is know to hang with some of the stars like Madonna and Michael seemed to be thrust in the shadows of places like Vegas after his improbable 8 golds that even with his talent required surreal real time performances with billions watching on TV.

If these people with their super duper training regiment and their ability to perform on the biggest stages can’t hold off the forces of depravity, you can especially call steroids that in the case of Alex, a designer drug from the devil, then what hope is there for that common person? But here is another highly focused and highly trained athlete with superhuman results that succumbed? But where does that leave the rest of us who just can’t get that training focus or might not have the same ability especially when you look at swimming where most couldn’t even fathom those speeds.

Alex seemed to be the poster boy for getting to the gym and doing it the right way and he already was big naturally. It was assumed that a number of the stratospheric home run hitters such as Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were at least at some point steroid users, but Alex was considered the anti steroid, the consummate gym person who did it without the aid of steroids. So it was the one home run path that was tracking outside the pathway or ballpark no pun intended of steroids and people were assuming that his numbers were pure so to speak.

It does seem like there would have been players who cut the corners and were basically too lazy to get the results that could be gotten from the gym. Someone like Rafael Palmiero might have fit that bill. So the gym purist felt maybe that Alex was one of the their own, the champion of spending a super amount of time in the gym and training right.

With Michael Phelps, there might be a number of things at work. Maybe it was such a relief to actually have done it and accomplished the near impossible that he just rebelled a bit and just relaxed a bit into a different mode of operandi. And mental toughness in sports doesn’t always equate with ability to steer through the party world unblemished.

Then within that age group, of say College age there is a culture of excess that is noted on campuses with regards to the use of alcohol and marijuana.

With Mr. Phelps, there might have been an element of jealousy out there, from those who couldn’t cross into his world and didn’t have those 8 golds and the ability to expense it into high pay endorsements. The jealous devourer is something to watch out for and how this exists and may operate is underrated. Way back look at what happened to Len Bias, he obviously was set up by the jealous nobodies who found there way onto a college campus just in time to ruin everything and bring the famous down to their level.

Both these athletes for sure have an inner brawn, where they can get out there and so it on the big stage. Alex has had some disappointing playoff series but he has overall performed very well in the limelight and in crowded ball fields filled at times with unfriendly fans.

Alex is obviously a great athlete, and had come to the majors as a velvety sleek shortstop. His sleek combination of skill and power, seemed to be honed further in his working out and he could usually be found in the gym.

In previous baseball lore, there wasn’t even the gym culture and the type of equipment that is available today. Ted Williams and Joe D didn’t have the same type of equipment and gym culture to build strength.

You can understand the uproar in baseball as numbers had been sacred, Roger Maris had a very rough time and he was simply trying to do his best and happened to run into a hallowed record.

A couple of other things here is that it does show how in the era of the internet and mass audio visual, anything gets amplified to a degree it never would have previously all over the world.

It may be that Alex’s confession is plausible as to the time frames, that he also may have fallen into a culture at the Texas Rangers that influenced him and he has been tested since 2004.

We’ll also see what his numbers are in the future as he is still in his prime.

Michael Phelps, who already lost a key cereal endorsement, never really has to swim again and he can square up and keep himself out of trouble and just live of the glory.

The Rodriquez admission may hurt baseball as a whole, and tarnish the game even further than the damage already done by steroids to the image of baseball. It is a shame because baseball does reverberate back to what seem at points to be in some ways more innocent times and at the least brings nostalgia to a lot of people and is considered an American pastime.

Phelps at least didn’t do any steroids himself so he might be able to a larger degree to recover his image.

The real focus of steroids though should be just on the science of what can go wrong from using them, and how people that can get this information quite easily, bypass the information and go to the supplier not of the information but of the drug, not realizing that sooner or later another giant bill for this is coming, with bizarre and strange side effects that are inescapable .

You can’t cheat science and the science of how side effects and damage will occur, and hopefully this can all be another lesson towards this.

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