A retired slugger on Tuesday claimed in his recently published autobiography that some South Korean athletes in the pro baseball league have used performance-enhancing drugs, according to Yonhap News.
In a bombshell announcement that could deal a serious blow to the reputation of the popular baseball community, Ma Hae-young, former infielder of the Busan-based Lotte Giants, insisted that he had personally witnessed his fellow players resorting to banned substances to artificially boost their performance.
"I witnessed some players habitually taking strictly banned steroid pills," Ma said in his memoir released on Tuesday. "Foreign players have been believed to use banned drugs and Korean players were no exception."
"They are under big pressure to yield good results."
The 38-year-old, now a sports commentator, wrote his autobiography titled "True Color of Baseball" after he retired from the field last year.
He goes on to say that Korean players got the drugs from the foreign ones.
"I remember clearly drug use by Korean players," Ma, the 2002 Korean Series MVP, told Yonhap. "They received the banned drugs from foreign players who had access to the pills."
Eight clubs have two foreign players each in the league.
"But the number of cases is less than 10. I am sure that they have not used the drug for extended periods but just tried it out of curiosity," said Ma, refusing to identify the players.
The KBO decided to start drug-testing foreign players; it has been testing Koreans since 2007. That last part is a little ambiguous, though, seeming to contradict what came earlier in the article about "habitual" usage.
3 comments:
I'm not referring to you, but to the writer here: People need to be very clear here when they're referring to "drugs," since it can be pharmaceuticals (약) or illegal psychotropics/narcotics (마약).
Some of the references in the article appear to be discussing performance-enhancing drugs, with which Ma appears to be including steroids, but some of the other references are not so clear and could also include, say, marijuana.
I think this must be seen as a positive development. Previously, although there was a "Hawaii of Korea" and "Britney Spears of Korea" and so on, never was there a "Jose Canseco of Korea". If the Jose Canseco deficit had lasted any longer the government might have been forced to take action.
Nathan, I have a little collection of those "Korea's _______" here:
http://briandeutsch.blogspot.com/2008/09/koreas-stephen-hawking-in-news-and-not.html.
I'll have to add your "Korea's Coors Field" to the list. "Korea's Jose Canseco" doesn't count yet because you made it up. It has to be in a paper or on a Korean website to work.
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