Alex Rodriguez once refuted the allegations of taking PEDs to beef up

Back in 2007, Alex Rodriguez claimed that he never used Performance Enhancing Drugs and that staying healthy and at the top of his game had never been a problem for him. This was two years before his name came up in a list of 104 players that had positive tests in a League survey of players using PEDs.

Rodriguez by 2007 had become a legend of the game. He had made headlines both on and off the pitch. By the end of his career, he was a 14-time All-Star and had garnered a lot of praise for his stint with both the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees. However, sandwiched in the middle was a brief three-year spell with the Texas Rangers that ended up being highly controversial.

In 2009, a report by Sports Illustrated showed that Rodriguez tested positive for two anabolic steroids, testosterone and Primobolan, during his 2003 season playing for the Texas Rangers. However, there was no arbitration for the players testing positive at the time. This report completely put to shame Rodriguez's admission on CBS News' 60 Minutes in 2007 that he had never taken PEDs.

"Getting big and being stronger was never my problem," he had said. "I have never felt overmatched on the baseball field....I'm just trying to be the best I can with the ability that God gave me."

Alex Rodriguez's 2007 interview came after Jose Canseco came out in public and accused A-Rod of being a hypocrite over the use of PEDs and wanted to follow up his bestseller book Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big with a second part. This was written off as some personal grudge against Rodriguez by Canseco.

Alex Rodriguez defended himself by stating "he felt a lot of pressure"

In defense of his actions, Alex Rodriguez came forward and talked about the immense amount of pressure he was facing at the time while at Rangers. He had recently signed the biggest ever contract in baseball history: a 10-year deal worth $252 million and thought that he had to justify his price tag.

"When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day. Back then, [baseball] was a different culture," Rodriguez had said. "It was very loose. I was young. I was stupid. I was naive. And I wanted to prove to everyone that I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time."

Alex Rodriguez was further embroiled in a doping controversy towards the fag end of his career in the 2013 Biogenesis scandal where apart from him thirteen other players were suspended by the MLB for prolonged use of PEDs from an American anti-aging clinic, Biogenesis. Rodriguez was banned from playing for the entirety of the 2014 season.