Mid-April is a brief lull in the yearly run of sporting events.  Super Bowl 50 took place a while ago, on February 7th, and March Madness is over.  In only a couple days, The NBA playoffs will start to revive our interest.  You might be a casual fan, a fanatic, or just a bystander who gets pulled into the festivities on game day.  Regardless, unless you are peacefully living off the grid, sports are ever-present in your life.

We enjoy the marriage of tasty snacks with the high-quality, adrenalin pumping entertainment of watching the best athletes perform.  We feel the ecstasy of victory and suffer the agony of defeat.  But even disappointment is never final.  In the endless marathon run of marathon runs (not to mention half-marathon, 10k, and 5k events alongside the 1500, 800, 400, 200 and 100 meter distances) there is perennially a new victor.  Sports spice up our everyday lives with an eternal well of bliss.

However, a sinister force threatens to tear apart our happiness: the restriction of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).  Regulators, such as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), descend on international sports like a grumpy parent scolding a child for playing outside in the snow.  “Come inside, Jonny,” they say. “You don’t want to catch pneumonia.”  They assume that health, and not happiness, is in everyone’s best interest.  “Don’t play with steroids, Baseball and Football.  I don’t want you coming down with another dreadful drug scandal,” these organizations say.  “Cycling, make sure to stay away from blood doping.  It’ll give you a nasty rash just like the one you got in France last July.”

PEDs supposedly plague sports with a lack of “authenticity” that will engineer their demise.  But PEDs don’t remove competition, they intensify it.  Athletes in a given sport use the same drugs.  When Lance Armstrong won his seven Tour de France titles, for example, he had to compete against other cyclists using the same PED’s.  Besides, what’s the more riveting headline: “Superstar Wins Record Number of Tours,” or “Cyclist Banned for Drug Use”?  So what if there are suspicions that Peyton Manning used human growth hormone to come back from injury.  If he hadn’t, the storyline of Manning winning his final Super Bowl would have been ruined, not to mention all the records he wouldn’t have broken.

Performance enhancing drugs improve sports.  PEDs bestow on us sprinters who can run 5 mph faster and tennis players who can serve 20 mph harder.  Aren’t superhuman athletes more interesting?  Let’s be honest: if nobody else brought it up, would we even care what each athlete is using or whether sports are authentic?  Or would we just keep watching?  Overbearing organizations stunt the hormone fueled growth of sports.  Authenticity is neither interesting nor sexy.  A world with PEDs is far more exhilarating than a world without them.  That’s why we need to embrace drugs in sport.

Sports inspire us.  Athletes are modern day heroes: strong role-models for us to emulate.   We worship the modern athlete.  We lay stagnant on our couches and longingly watch the achievements of our favorite sprinter or swimmer to satisfy our own desire for fame. 

It’s time to make a change.  As the average American, it’s safe to assume you probably won’t be the next hall-of-fame quarterback.  But you sure can be as fit and muscular as a football player.  There’s a lesson to be learned from drugs in sports: if you want to be the most successful and most popular you need to be as juiced as possible.  So go out and seize your opportunity to be a miniature superstar.  You’ll need the muscle building steroids, the recovery stimulating testosterone, the blood thickening hormones, the cardio strengthening blood transfusions and synthetic blood cells, the gamma radiation, and everything else on the Olympic list of banned substances.

Regrettably, you probably won’t have the time or money to take every last drug.  You need to identify which drugs to use.  Anabolic steroids and testosterone can help you gain muscle and achieve that physique you’ve always wanted.  If you want to improve your cardiovascular performance, get your hands on EPO, a hormone that boosts production of red blood cells.  With thicker blood, you can carry more oxygen in your veins.  More oxygen means better performance.  You can also try blood transfusions.  A large amount of blood will be siphoned from your body, frozen, and stored for months at a time.  After your body has replenished all the blood, the cells can be thawed and added right back into your bloodstream to quench your vampire-like thirst for excellence.  Your engine just got extra cylinders.  Now, instead of being an ordinary sedan, you’ll be a supercharged, nitroglycerine-infused, V12 Lamborghini.

You should be able to purchase the steroids and testosterone without any problems.  Other drug regulations won’t be as lenient.  You’ll need to suddenly come down with cancer to obtain an EPO prescription stateside.  Not to fear:  regulations in other countries are different.  You’re just a plane ticket away from most European countries.  Look around carefully to find the right one.  Once you’ve found the perfect country, book your flight to Switzerland.  Who knows?  You may even meet your favorite former U.S. Postal cyclist and share a cappuccino while discussing how to improve EPO absorption.  Blood transfusions are more complicated.  You’ll need to find trained medical staff to extract and freeze your blood. 

Of course, all these drugs have potential medical complications.   A small sampling of side effects include accelerating the growth of cancer, shrinking your genitals or altering your behavior.  If the blood cells from your transfusion get too cold and rupture, or heat up and die, there could be serious complications, such as vomiting a ludicrous amount of bodily fluids.  A contaminated blood bag could leave you with a deadly infection.

But it’s a small price to pay for being able to maintain an unnatural level of performance.  With all of these PEDs running through your veins, you’ll be so muscular and fit that you might legitimately be mistaken for a Greek god.  Everyone will love this perfect, invincible, new you.

Besides, admit it:  it’s getting tiresome being the normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill you.  You never really wanted to work all your life for a sustainable future and a modest legacy.  You always thought that you were destined for something greater; that one day you would be famous and rich.  That’s the American dream, isn’t it?  If you work hard, you can make it anywhere you want.  But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that being authentic isn’t the way to fulfill your dreams.  So ditch the integrity.  Lie and cheat your way to the top; it’s the only way to get there.