The most hallowed record in American sports was broken in 2007 – not with a bang, but with a grumble: "Grumble grumble steroids... grumble grumble cheater... grumble grumble asterisk."

Just like people voted to deface Barry Bonds' record-breaking ball with an asterisk, many baseball fans feel like Bonds has defaced the game by using performance-enhancing drugs to help him break the single-season and all-time home run records. He has never failed a test, but the circumstantial evidence and second-hard reports are pretty damning.

According to the 2006 book Game of Shadows, Bonds first began injecting himself with steroids after the 1998 season because he was jealous of all the attention Mark McGwire received for breaking Roger Maris' single-season home run record. In 2000, he was introduced to the California drug lab, BALCO, which got him on a cocktail of supplements including human growth hormones and the undetectable steroids they called "The Cream" and "The Clear". With his newfound superhuman strength, Bonds broke McGwire's single-season home run record in 2001 and won his first batting title in 2002.

In 2003, BALCO was raided by federal agents and the lab's owner, Victor Conte, spilled the beans about their illegal operations and their famous clients, including Bonds and Olympic champion sprinter Marion Jones. After many years of denials, Jones finally came clean this year and Bonds is currently on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice charges that he lied under oath about knowingly taking steroids.

Of course, most of us would have preferred that Bonds had been put on trial before he had a chance to break Hank Aaron's all-time home run record this season. Likewise, Senator George Mitchell's report on usage of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in baseball would have been welcomed by those who now believe that Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro cheated to produce their Hall-of-Fame-worthy numbers.

As the most prominent accused steroid user in sports and the man who has shone a spotlight on what is now known as the Steroids Era in baseball, Bonds and Mitchell are inextricably connected as the biggest sports figures in 2007. While nobody believes that the Mitchell Report is comprehensive (Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are let off the hook, although a reference is made to Jose Canseco's claims about McGwire's steroid use in Canseco's 1998 book, Juiced), baseball fans now have to face the fact that Bonds was not one of a select few cheaters, but part of a significant percentage of PED users in Major League Baseball.

The legacy of Bonds and Mitchell will be that no elite athlete at the highest levels of their sports will ever again be completely trusted to be PED-free. Every time we come up with more sophisticated ways to detect new PEDs, places like BALCO are developing new chemicals that can't be detected by even the latest tests. The Mitchell Report will not end The Steroids Era, it merely confirmed its existence.

Where does that leave us, the fans who look up to these sports heroes and desperately want to believe that there will be a day when the cheaters will not dominate our favourite sports? Well, you could abandon baseball for another sport you believe to be "cleaner", but just because there's no Mitchell Report for that sport, that doesn't mean PED use isn't prevalent.

People will do what they need to do to maximize their success, inside and outside of sports, legality be damned. Stop worshipping sports heroes as superior beings to ourselves. They lie and cheat just like the rest of us. In fact, considering the privilege many of them feel because of their status, they're probably less moral than most of you reading this.

Does that mean we should feel morally superior to Barry Bonds? Well, go ahead if that makes you feel good about yourself. Me, I know better. I know that most of us are only as moral as our options.

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