Doping in sport
In competitive sports, doping is the use of banned athletic performance-enhancing drugs by athletes as a way of cheating. As stated in the World Anti-Doping Code by WADA, doping is defined as the occurrence of one or more of the anti-doping rule violations outlined in Article 2.1 through Article 2.11 of the Code. The term doping is widely used by organizations that regulate sporting competitions. The use of drugs to enhance performance is considered unethical and is prohibited by most international sports organizations, including the International Olympic Committee. Furthermore, athletes taking explicit measures to evade detection exacerbate the ethical violation with overt deception and cheating.
The origins of doping in sports go back to the creation of the sport itself. From ancient usage of substances in chariot racing to more recent controversies in doping in baseball, doping in tennis, doping at the Olympic Games, and doping at the Tour de France, popular views among athletes have varied widely from country to country over the years. The general trend among authorities and sporting organizations over the past several decades has been to regulate the use of drugs in sports strictly. The reasons for the ban are mainly the health risks of performance-enhancing drugs, the equality of opportunity for athletes, and the exemplary effect of drug-free sports for the public. Anti-doping authorities state that using performance-enhancing drugs goes against the "spirit of sport".
History
The use of drugs in sports goes back centuries, about back to the very invention of the concept of sports. In ancient times, when the fittest of a nation were selected as athletes or combatants, they were fed diets and given treatments considered beneficial to help increase muscle. For instance, Scandinavian mythology says Berserkers could drink a mixture called "butotens" to greatly improve their physical power at the risk of insanity, which is thought to have been prepared using the Amanita muscaria mushroom.The ancient Olympics in Greece have been alleged to have had forms of doping. In ancient Rome, where chariot racing had become a huge part of their culture, athletes drank herbal infusions to strengthen them before chariot races.
From that moment, people started to introduce their specific diets to improve their performance. Lots of athletes were mainly focusing on achieving superiority and winning the competition by increasing muscle strength capacity, and endurance. Charmis, the Spartan winner of the Stade race in the Olympic Games of 668BC, introduced the special diet of consuming enough dried figs during the training period.
A participant in an endurance walking race in Britain, Abraham Wood, said in 1807 that he had used laudanum to keep him awake for 24 hours while competing against Robert Barclay Allardyce. By April 1877, walking races had stretched to and the following year, also at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, London, to. The Illustrated London News chided:
The event proved popular, however, with 20,000 spectators attending each day. Encouraged, the promoters developed the idea and soon held similar races for cyclists.
The fascination with six-day bicycle races spread across the Atlantic and appealed to the crowds in America as well. And the more spectators paid at the gate, the higher the prizes could be and the greater was the incentive of riders to stay awake—or be kept awake—to ride the greatest distance. Their exhaustion was countered by soigneurs, helpers akin to seconds in boxing. Among the treatments they supplied was nitroglycerine, a drug used to stimulate the heart after cardiac attacks and which was credited with improving riders' breathing. Riders had hallucinations from the exhaustion and perhaps the drugs. The American champion Major Taylor refused to continue the New York race, saying: "I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand."
Public reaction turned against such trials, whether individual races or in teams of two. One report said:
The father of anabolic steroids in the United States was John Ziegler, a physician for the U.S. weightlifting team in the mid-20th century. In 1954, on his tour to Vienna with his team for the world championship, Ziegler learned from his Russian colleague that the Soviet weightlifting team's success was due to their use of testosterone as a performance-enhancing drug. Deciding that U.S. athletes needed chemical assistance to remain competitive, Ziegler worked with the CIBA Pharmaceutical Company to develop an oral anabolic steroid. This resulted in the creation of methandrostenolone, which appeared on the market in 1960 under the brand name Dianabol. During the Olympics that year, the Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen collapsed and died while competing in the 100-kilometer race. An autopsy later revealed the presence of amphetamines and a drug called nicotinyl tartrate in his system.
The American specialist in doping, Max M. Novich, wrote: "Trainers of the old school who supplied treatments which had cocaine as their base declared with assurance that a rider tired by a six-day race would get his second breath after absorbing these mixtures." John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, said six-day races were "de facto experiments investigating the physiology of stress as well as the substances that might alleviate exhaustion."
Prevalence
Over 30% of athletes participating in 2011 World Championships in Athletics admitted having used banned substances during their careers. According to a study commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, actually 44% of them had used them. Nevertheless, only 0.5% of those tested were caught.The entire Russian track and field team was banned from the 2016 Olympic Games, as the Russian State had sponsored and essentially sanctioned their doping program.
Goldman's dilemma
Goldman's dilemma, or the Goldman dilemma, is a question that was posed to elite athletes by physician, osteopath and publicist Bob Goldman, asking whether they would take a drug that would guarantee them success in sport, but cause them to die after five years. In his research, as in previous research by Mirkin, approximately half the athletes responded that they would take the drug, but modern research by James Connor and co-workers has yielded much lower numbers, with athletes having levels of acceptance of the dilemma that were similar to the general population of Australia.Substances
The most common prohibited substances for doping in sport are:- Anabolic steroids, which increase muscle mass and physical strength.
- Stimulants, which increase excitement and decrease the sensation of fatigue.
Other ways of cheating that change the body without using foreign substances include injecting one's own red blood cells as done with doping at the Tour de France, treating blood with UV light or the use of a hyperbaric chamber, and, potentially, gene doping.
Anabolic steroids
Anabolic-androgenic steroids were first isolated, identified and synthesized in the 1930s, and are now used therapeutically in medicine to induce bone growth, stimulate appetite, induce male puberty, and treat chronic wasting conditions, such as cancer and AIDS. Anabolic steroids also increase muscle mass and physical strength, and are therefore used in sports and bodybuilding to enhance strength or physique. Known side effects include harmful changes in cholesterol levels, acne, high blood pressure, and liver damage. Some of these effects can be mitigated by taking supplemental drugs.AAS use in American sports began in October 1954 when John Ziegler, a doctor who treated American athletes, went to Vienna with the American weightlifting team. There he met a Russian physician who, over "a few drinks", repeatedly asked "What are you giving your boys?" When Ziegler returned the question, the Russian said that his own athletes were being given testosterone. Returning to America, Ziegler tried low doses of testosterone on himself, on the American trainer Bob Hoffman and on two lifters, Jim Park and Yaz Kuzahara. All gained more weight and strength than any training programme would produce but there were side-effects. Ziegler sought a drug without after-effects and hit upon the anabolic steroid methandrostenolone, first made in the US in 1958 by Ciba and marketed as Dianabol.
The results were so impressive that lifters began taking more, and steroids spread to other sports. Paul Lowe, a former running back with the San Diego Chargers American football team, told a California legislative committee on drug abuse in 1970: "We had to take them at lunchtime. He would put them on a little saucer and prescribed them for us to take them and if not he would suggest there might be a fine."
Olympic statistics show the weight of shot putters increased 14 percent between 1956 and 1972, whereas steeplechasers weight increased 7.6 percent. The gold medalist pentathlete Mary Peters said: "A medical research team in the United States attempted to set up extensive research into the effects of steroids on weightlifters and throwers, only to discover that there were so few who weren't taking them that they couldn't establish any worthwhile comparisons." Brand name Dianabol is no longer produced but the drug methandrostenolone itself is still made in many countries and other, similar drugs are made elsewhere. The use of anabolic steroids is now banned by all major sporting bodies, including the ATP, WTA, ITF, International Olympic Committee, FIFA, UEFA, all major professional golf tours, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the European Athletic Association, WWE, the NFL, and the UCI. However, drug testing can be wildly inconsistent and, in some instances, has gone unenforced.
A number of studies measuring anabolic steroid use in high school athletes found that out of all 12th grade students, 6.6 percent of them had used anabolic steroids at some point in their high school careers or were approached and counseled to use them. Of those students who acknowledged doping with anabolic–androgenic steroids, well over half participated in school-sponsored athletics, including football, wrestling, track and field, and baseball. A second study showed 6.3 percent of high school student Football players admitted to current or former AAS use. At the collegiate level, surveys show that AAS use among athletes range from 5 percent to 20 percent and continues to rise. The study found that skin changes were an early marker of steroid use in young athletes, and underscored the important role that dermatologists could play in the early detection and intervention in these athletes.