Avid sports fans are always dreaming of the perfect matchup. It's never enough to see who wins this or that grubby real-life contest. We want to know who's the absolute, all-time best--Barry Bonds or The Babe? Shaq or Wilt? Ali or Joe Louis?

That's why we obsess about records. Records let us pit the best against the best in games we can only imagine.

Of course, records can't really settle any such questions, because few records are totally equivalent. In games, such as baseball or basketball, rules, conditions, strategies, and equipment change.

Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a single game, but he was 7 feet tall at a time when big men were rare in the NBA. You have to allow for that when you compare him to Shaq.

Babe Ruth hit 60 homers in a single season, but back then starting pitchers were far less likely to be yanked in favor of a relief pitcher. How would Ruth fare against today's pitching staffs of starters, middle-relievers, and closers? What's more, Ruth played at a time when Major League Baseball excluded some of the game's best athletes--black players. Would he have launched 60 round-trippers had the sport been open to the best pitchers regardless of race?

Ambiguities like these never slow us down. They're part of the game we play. We absorb them into our calculations and go on talking about whether Shaq could take Wilt.

The spoiler
But when steroids enter the picture, we stop talking. Steroids spoil the game, and not just because they're illegal or harmful, or because taking them sets a bad example for youth. Yeah, yeah, all that too, but the real problem lies elsewhere. Steroids damage sports in a way that is unique to sports. 

Consider: If there were such a thing as Brain Steroids, which enabled writers to produce better novels, we might disapprove of their use on all the grounds cited above: illegal, damaging, etc.

But we would not discount the novel because it was created on brain steroids. The same goes for math, music, architecture, and many other fields. We wouldn't mark an asterisk next to a mathematical theorem, for example, just because the mathematician who came up with the theorem used an Artificial IQ Accelerator.

Sports are different
In sports, however, the record is not important in and of itself. It's important because of what it says about the performer--and about ourselves. It purely signifies that this is what a human being can do. And we fans are interested in this because we are human beings. The athletic record is making a statement about what "we" can do. Every time a new record is set, it redefines what it means to be a human being. Even we couch potatoes reap the benefit. "Hey, turns out we can jump 29 feet 4½ inches--we're so great!"

It's the same spirit we couch potatoes display when we pour into the streets after a big football victory to shout "We're number one!" as if we did anything on game day but gobble chips.

We don't get that same crucial thrill if a guy jumps 30 feet wearing spring-loaded shoes, because then it's the shoes setting the record, and we're not shoes.

Steroids are like spring-loaded shoes. They obviate the whole point of noting record-breaking sports performances.

Yet steroids and other performance distorters are pressing in on sports from every side. Why is this?

Surely we all create this pressure together. It comes from our addiction to the thrill of seeing our species gloriously redefined. As soon as a new record is set, that level of performance becomes the next line in the sand. All of us breathlessly expect the next athlete to leap past it.