Why are we so opposed to performance-enhancing drugs in sport?

Consider the teenage Olympic-level gymnast in one of our studies who consumed analgesics by the handful to control her chronically agonising joint pain [11]. An ever-vigilant scanner of the banned-substance list, she reported her delight as a stronger painkiller became available when it was removed from prohibition. Our gymnast, drug use in sports like the cyclists in another of our studies [15], also consumed significant quantities of caffeine but still viewed herself as ‘clean’. Then, there was the case of a wheelchair powerlifter sanctioned by his governing body under a therapeutic exemption to use nandrolone decanoate to rehabilitate a torn pectoralis major.

Avalanche players express shock, disappointment in Valeri Nichushkin news: “He made his decisions”

While far from aligning with hegemonic ideals of sport and anti-doping, systematic doping has provided a way of protecting athletes from the risks and harms produced by anti-doping within the sports environment. These efforts exist in tension with anti-doping, forming a responsive relationship between the two groups. Anti-doping has responded with increased levels of athlete surveillance, increased penalties, and developing new methods of detecting doping. Nutritional supplements include vitamins, minerals, herbs, extracts, and metabolites.39 https://ecosoberhouse.com/ Importantly, the purity of these substances cannot be guaranteed, such that they may contain banned substances without the athlete or manufacturer being aware. Despite the pressures on serious athletes to use substances as they move along the performance pathway, our data show that mid-tier athletes practice considerable self-determination in selecting which substances to utilise [14]. Yet we know little about these cogitations, when athletes are most vulnerable during their life cycles and the decision-making that emerges as a consequence.

Canada Re-Criminalizes Public Drug Use in British Columbia

• More, these forms of help are a natural progression from simply adjusting saddle height to achieve an optimum position, for example.
• By shifting the focus from the individual athlete to the sporting context, we can see how harms to doping athletes are socially produced (c.f. Rhodes, 2002).
• Equally, it also allows for a stronger platform of education and social marketing and the provision of personnel and facilities that ensure a safe and protective sport environment where athlete welfare holds sovereign.
• Despite the growing research on a range of recreational drug risk and enabling environments, very little research has been done to similarly understand the environments in which doping occurs.
• Trainers, coaches, and health care providers should provide evidence-based, safe alternatives to PED use, including optimal nutrition, weight-training strategies, and psychological approaches to improving performance, all of which may help with athletes’ confidence in their natural abilities.

By analysing known cases of systematic doping we can see how they employed strategies similar to those outlined in Table 2. We have one policy model driven by a fundamentalist concern for punishment, zero tolerance and abstinence, and another underpinned by an idealistic concern for athlete autonomy, agency, and safety. Each of these positions has its strengths and weaknesses, but we need to determine which model ensures sports’ integrity the most, which one delivers the best outcomes for players and athletes, and which one offers the opportunity for sports’ other stakeholders to also benefit. However, these policy options are difficult to precisely evaluate, since subjectivity and bias inevitably get in the way of an impartial analysis, even where a lot of objective evidence has been compiled. Zero tolerance is likely to deliver lower levels of use, but it will impact on a player’s civil liberties, and the overall harms to the athletes may not necessarily be lowered since banned substance use presents only one of many catalysts for harm to occur in and through sport. A harm reduction approach will deliver greater autonomy to athletes, while pro-actively seeking to contain the damage to users and the people around them.

• For example, how each side will respond and adjust when unexpected outside forces – such as the current Covid-19 pandemic that has led to the postponement of World and Olympic level events – upset the tug of war.
• The real concern behind the cheating claim is that athletes who use drugs are gaining an unfair advantage by accessing something not available to those who follow the rules.
• In a career spanning more than three decades, Pat has worked at Yahoo! Sports, ESPN and the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Athletes Using Stimulant Drugs

It’s a slippery slope between allowing steroid use with proper medical supervision and eliminating anti-doping regulations. Will it now be illegal to use steroids only if taken without proper medical supervision? How does an athlete prove that the steroids in his or her body were as a result of proper medical supervision and not other means?

The second is that performance-enhancing drugs threaten the health of athletes. It is not as though sport is somehow bereft of human struggle or magnificence. The only thing that is bad about sport today is that some athletes are getting a small advantage that others aren’t, and people are regularly getting tossed out or brought under a cloud by rules that are unfit for purpose. It is not providing assurances to the public that good performances are clean. “Non suspicious” blood data does not prove that no doping technique has been used, only that it did not exceed a certain range, or vary beyond a certain degree. Current anti-doping measures rely primarily upon the punishment of athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs.

There Are No Sound Moral Arguments Against Performance-Enhancing Drugs

• Athletes did still suffer harms within these systems, often at the hands of central organising individuals or groups in the forms of bullying, coercion, and extortion.
• The leagues tend to treat marijuana as a recreational drug; athletes, however, have cited it as a substance that helps with recovery and pain management.
• If an athlete is not competing with someone else, they are competing with who they were yesterday, striving to do better, to be better.
• The greatest area of concern, he noted, was the level of up and coming athletes trying to get what he called a ‘breakthrough’, which made them more susceptible to substance abuse.
• The FDA defends its review process and its call for tests of the sunscreens sold in American stores as a way to ensure the safety of products that many people use daily, rather than just a few times a year at the beach.
• It was not revealed by the league or players association what led to Nichushkin being admitted to the program.

The Battle Against Doping in Sports