Performance Enhancing Drugs Essay

791 Words4 Pages

Performance enhancing drugs have been recognised around the sporting screen for well over fifty years (ProCon.org, 2013). There is a constant battle to keep the athletes clean and competition fair. There is the sport and it's testers, who's advances such as discovering more performance enhancing substances and the development of the World Anti- Doping Agency (Dr Laurence Knott, 2012) are beginning to have substantial effect. While on the other side we have the drug cheats themselves that along with the "shady" medical characters and money, utilise research methods to enhance their performance in ways which are still undetectable. This analysis will look at who is winning this battle.

Sport is winning it's battle against performance enhancing substances for number of reasons. New ways of testing athletes have been developed, as well as new substances that enhance performance are being discovered. There are strict rules/penalties in place for drug offenders. At a high sporting level, Athletes can get banned anywhere between a few months and a life time, with the most common ban being two years (wikipedia.org). They can also be stripped of what they have won and are sometimes required to pay a fine (Melissa Breyer, 2012). Over the years high-profile cases such as Lance Armstrong demonstrate that no matter how famous, anyone can be caught and …show more content…

The main reason for this is that people are not only developing new forms of performance enhancing drugs, but also finding new was to mask these drugs if they are tested. Some of the main performance drugs athletes are taking are anabolic steroids, peptide hormones, Beta2 agonists and different types of narcotics (BBC, 2014). In BBC's 2014 article Sport Ethics Debate, they say "It is likely that drugs manufacturers will continue to be steps ahead of the regulators. It is possible, even likely, that there are other 'undetectable' drugs in