F.For every professional athlete there comes at some point in their career when they ponder what it would be like to pep up their physique with a few products from the pharmacy. At such moments, quite a few resort to a material that promises a lot, even if it doesn’t keep a lot. For the American James Galvin, one of the best baseball players of his generation, this point came when he was 32. When, after several exhausting years, he felt so drained that he reached for a mysterious powder. The year? 1889. The means? Dried monkey testicles.
That Galvin was firmly convinced of the effect does not mean that the substance really had an effect. Nevertheless, its history in America is considered the zero hour of a development in which high-performance sport became a field of experimentation for medicine. With athletes who willingly allow themselves to be made test objects for doping substances and painkillers. And who, like LeBron James, the best basketball player of this century, spend around $ 1.5 million a year just not to miss a new fitness trend. Be it your own cold chamber, electrical stimulation devices for muscle building or a private cook on the cutting edge of nutritional science.
The corona pandemic, it seems, has confronted this performance-fixated and body-conscious athlete with a curious dilemma for the first time and mentally thrown many high-profile athletes off track. Because while those responsible in the leagues used scientific knowledge to develop the tools for a sport that is as safe and contagion-free as possible and set up appropriate rules, the tendency to puff around is spreading among athletes across all sports worldwide.
Discussion about vaccination
Among the spokesmen who, interestingly enough, like to question almost everything, but not themselves at all, include the American basketball player Kyrie Irving. The Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic. And the American football player Aaron Rodgers, who even violated the National Football League’s corona code of conduct. But it’s not just the words that Irving, Djokovic, Rodgers and many others think like them. It’s the deeds too: you don’t want to get vaccinated.
Now that the virus has penetrated the circle of the most important sports team in Germany this week, vaccination in top-class sport is again being discussed here. On Tuesday, Oliver Bierhoff, the director of the German Football Association (DFB), announced in a press conference that the national player Niklas Süle had tested positive for Covid-19.
It was in the debate that followed, but not about Süle, who is fully vaccinated. But about four other players who tested negative, but had to leave anyway because they had contact with him. One of them: Joshua Kimmich, the midfielder of FC Bayern Munich, who publicly stated in October in response to a report by Bild that he had not been vaccinated because of personal concerns “regarding the lack of long-term studies”. Now he has felt the consequences of his decision for the first time: He has been excluded from the game he has oriented his life towards.
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