It seems that almost all sports have an issue with doping. Steroids, blood doping, amphetamines, a whole slew of substances that make one stronger, faster, or provide greater stamina are available and athletes WILL use them if they believe they can get away with it.
At present, it seems that drug testing is more or less random, giving someone a chance to cheat his non-doping competitors and get away with it.
As a proposal, why not guarantee that the winners of a given competition will be tested thoroughly?
On the down side, there would be delays in announcing the winners and athletes would resent the assumption. Also, this really wouldn’t work with team sports.
On the up side, this would seem to remove any incentive to actually use the drugs.
Are the winners of major individual events not tested as a matter of course already? The result is announced as usual, but you do sometimes hear afterwards that so-and-so tested positive for “the banned substance X”. As in the case of Ben Johnson, the result is recalculated and the medals reallocated.
I don’t know what happens in team sports - what if one or two members of the World Cup winning team are found to have been doped? Does the team forfeit the cup?
I think it’s a bit unfair to suggest that all athletes would take drugs given the chance. Many drugs can have pretty unpleasant implications for one’s health, as some competitors from former Eastern-Bloc countries are now finding.
I don’t think that testing the winners alone is really enough: plenty of people never win events, but this doesn’t mean that (for example, in athletics) their personal records or relatice position in the field aren’t important to them. As far as I know this is the area currently covered by random testing.
I wondered if this was going to be a thread suggesting that all testing was useless and that we should just let athletes take whatever they liked and get on with watching the results of “assisted” sport. Athletes do plenty of things already to assist their performance (training at altitude, special diet supplements etc.) so what is it we have against “drugs”? Is it purely because of the health risks? What is “natural” in terms of human physical capability?
Only throwing those out there, because I wonder how we draw the line as to what is “natural”: I am all for continuing to aspire to see how far human beings can push themselves naturally, I just wonder how we define what “natural” is.
We deny drugs because it isn’t the athelete thats competing. To search for more focused and better methods of training, and new highs for intensity, well, that is one thing. To take a pharmaceutical compund to do the work for you is quite another. PLus, the health issues are not to be dismissed lightly.
An athlete who has trained at higher altitudes has increased his strength and performaces levels through his own hardwork and resilence. He plays better because he has made himself a better athlete.
An athlete who has blocked out his pain receptors through the use of drugs is playing better because he’s momentarily immune to the pain. This doesn’t make him a better athlete, it just makes him the idiot who can’t feel that his leg is broken, and so can continue with the game.