Performance Enhancing Drugs

For many years sports have played huge roles in human’s everyday lives. From entertainment, political, financial and to actually competing in them. The task for the sportsmen or women, especially in the top rank, is to beat the other competitors and get a good result from it. Here there is a high amount of pressure on many athletes coming from the media, coaches, themselves etc. They have the wanting to do well and achieve their goals and aims so much that some of the athletes turn to performance enhancing drugs. Obviously training for competition is the main thing to do but using drugs is another helper to succeeding. So, to their way of thinking, doping does not seem like cheating it just seems like something that has to be done for success.

Using chemicals in the hopes of improving athletic performance is nothing new. If you were an athlete in the Greek Olympic days, your coach might have suggested you try different mushrooms to gain a competitive advantage. Doping, however, in the sense used today, really came onto the scene in the 19th century. The first drugs to be used were heroine and morphine. Heroine was mainly found in horse-racing circles, while morphine was very much in fashion in boxing and so-called endurance sports. It was suspected of having caused the death of Arthur Lindon, a Welsh racing cyclist who died a few months after the Bordeaux-Paris race of 1896, thereby becoming the first ever recorded victim of doping. Things really got out of hand at the beginning of the 20th century, with strychnine and ephedrine making their appearance, not to mention steroids. Over the last few years, doping has taken a new, dangerous turn. Growth hormones drugs have appeared, as well as doping involving transfusions of the athlete’s own blood, and then erythropoietin, perfluorcarbons and reticulate haemoglobin. All this has changed the whole course of doping. Drugs used to be taken just for a one-off effect which activated various standard bodily...