Illustration by Elena Griedel
For those who don’t pay much attention to the news, seeing Russian athletics playing under an Olympic flag during the Olympics may have been befuddling. What could have possibly happened that would strip these flaunted athletes of the right to play under their country’s flag? The answer is simple, and one that continues to suspend and expel athletes, not to mention stain their legacies for years to come.
Doping, which is the consumption of performance enhancing drugs, is widespread among sports, most notably in baseball, cycling, and football. While the problem is widespread, the response is far from that.
Take the National Football League (NFL) for example. If you are caught using a banned performance-enhancing drug (PED), it is a minimum of a two game suspension. The list of PED’s is more than five pages long, and athletes could take any supplement with a hidden ingredient and end up suspended for two games (regular or postseason) without pay. As a result, NFL players must be extremely careful about their nutrition or else they could risk not only suspension but also serious repercussions for their career and franchise.
Secondly, we can examine the way doping is treated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). At the 2012 London Olympics, it was eventually found that the Russian Confederation systematically gave banned substances to more than one thousand athletes, while premeditatedly evading tests with stocked pee samples. In the IOC’s most recent policy on doping, athletes found of using banned PEDs in most cases would be suspended from the Olympics but no further competitions.
On a more local level, Berkeley High School (BHS) athletes are prohibited from using any androgenic/anabolic steroids. This is the part of the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) policy that schools must agree to in order to be a recognized member of CIF. While this is the case, there are no doping tests for athletes at Berkeley High, meaning it would be feasible for someone to take steroids.
There are many misconceptions surrounding doping. Since many of the substances that are banned in sports can be purchased at a pharmacy, people don’t understand why they are bad. First of all, medications are for people with specific health issues, not for athletes. In addition, all medications have side effects, and taking them repeatedly can cause serious damage to one’s body and destroy their athletic career. More dangerous forms of doping include blood transfusions, which are done to try and alter the way blood carries oxygen to the rest of your bodies. These procedures can lead to an increased risk of heart failure, stroke, kidney damage, and high blood pressure. Steroids can also make one bald, aggressive, and suicidal.
As an athlete myself, I am often perplexed by the use of banned PEDs by elite athletes. After all, these athletes have worked their entire life to get to the place they are now; why risk it?
The obvious answer is that getting away with it is manageable. If athletes were always caught, then they would stop, that is just the logical response. Since they aren’t getting caught, the possibility of fame and fortune must easily outweigh the chance of getting caught, or else the use of banned PEDs would be far more rare.
But then if you aren’t caught, how could you live with yourself? Imagine standing on a podium, surrounded by other athletes who have worked for years only to lose to you. Having that on your conscience seems like an almost unbearable weight. Even worse is the feeling had by an athlete who lost to someone who was later found to have cheated their way to victory.
In order to limit cheating in sports where they give a significant advantage to those who use it, there seems to be two obvious solutions. Both polar opposites, but both could be effective.
The first idea being that punishment must be harsher when it is judged that the use of the banned PED was intentional and known. Why not just suspend athletes for a season? Or for life? Serious punishment and enforcement could easily provide the scare factor needed to distinguish any use by professional athletes. The second solution is completely the opposite. What if we just made all PEDs legal? This policy would mean that anyone could use them, so it wouldn’t give an advantage. Many say that the legalization of PEDs would be very dangerous, but who is the commissioner to tell an athlete what they can put in their body? After all, these are adults who should be able to make rational decisions about nutrition.