Drug Use In Olympics Essay Research Paper

Drug Use In Olympics Essay, Research Paper

A constant battle has been fought as the International Olympic Committee struggles to keep drug testing up-to-date and effective. We have come to associate drug use with a few famous names of fallen heroes, such as Ben Johnson, but few realize just how widespread drug use is in Olympic sports and how small a percentage of offenders ever get caught. Recent studies show that increased testing procedures have done little to deter athletes from relying on drugs to aid performance and that drug use among Olympic athletes is actually on the rise.

Performance-enhancing drug use is not limited to the Olympic games. There are few sports that have not been affected in some way by drug use, and the effect has usually been negative. Certain sports quickly come to mind when we thing of drug use. We think of bodybuilders and weight lifters as obvious candidates for using steroids and other muscle or strength-building substances, but few would consider long distance runners or gymnasts as potential drug abusers. The fact is that there are a numerous of substances currently available with potential benefits for athletes in all sports.

These desired effects range from increasing muscle size and strength, to decreasing fatigue, providing quick temporary weight loss, inhibiting growth, and even simple pain relief. Most professional sports do not have rigorous testing procedures for performance enhancing drugs for the simple facts that there are too many drugs to test for, and the tests are deemed too easy to beat. This presents the International Olympic Committee ( IOC ) with one of it s greatest challenges; trying to keep it s drug testing procedures at a par with the technology of today s pharmacists. Many ask what constitutes a performance-enhancing drug. An ergogenic or performance aid is defined as any substance or method used to enhance athletic performance (Tipton 13). Currently, the IOC has over two hundred substances on it s Prohibited Substance list, which are broken down into five main categories; Stimulants, Narcotics, Anabolic Agents, Diuretics, and Peptide and glycoprotein hormones and analogues. The first major problem that the IOC faces when posing these tests is that many of these drugs can be cycled , where the athlete stops taking doses long enough ahead of time so that no trace of the drug will show up in urine samples. Most athletes are aware of the time needed to stay clean , or off the drugs, so that they will test negative, and many common drugs are untraceable in the system after only days or weeks. One of the more popular drugs of late, Human Growth Hormone, or somatotropin, is rapidly metabolized by the liver and has a half-life in the blood of approximately 17 to 45 minutes. Because of this expeditious breakdown, detecting GH in a drug screen is close to impossible (Street 228). Another problem is the testing procedure itself. Samples are tested for a list of known substances, and since new drugs have to be used and discovered in tests before the IOC is aware of them and can include them on the list, those athletes who have access to the newest products have the advantage of using drugs not yet on the banned list. In addition, most of these drugs leave certain traces, or signatures , in urine samples, and it is often these signatures and not the actual drugs that show up in positive tests.

As each drug is chemically unique, each signature left behind is also unique, and therefore a common practice is the creation of designer drugs , or chemically altered drugs. By slightly altering the chemical composition of a drug it can be tailored to an athlete s specific needs, and the new drug will have the added bonus of an unknown signature and be therefore untraceable. Quite often, placing a substance on the banned list will actually stimulate interest among athletes and lead to increased use of that drug. The logic being that if a drug is placed on the list, it must provide some sort of advantage, or the IOC would not bother to control it. Although intended to deter drug use in the athletes, Ironically, the IOC catalog of 200 banned substances has come to serve as a shopping list. for many Olympic athletes (Bamberger and Yaeger 7). In addition, many of these athletes have access to the same high-tech equipment used by the IOC to detect drugs, allowing them to familiarize themselves with levels of detection and necessary clearance times for different drugs. This is how many athletes are able to consistently avoid testing positive, while maintaining a diverse regimen of drugs. In addition to prohibited substances, the IOC also lists some classes of drugs as being subject to certain restrictions, including alcohol and marijuana. While these substances are not believed to provide the athlete with any unfair advantage, they are regulated for safety reasons. Certain procedures have also been prohibited in Olympic competition, including drug test manipulation and blood doping.

Blood doping, now common in many endurance events, involves systematically removing quantities of an athlete s blood before a competition and storing it. Over time the athlete s body replaces the lost blood and returns blood levels to normal. Finally, just prior to a competition, the stored blood is re-injected creating an artificially high blood level and a resulting high level of red blood cells. While extremely risky to the athlete,