Performance Enhancing Drugs

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 i...

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...ity without drugs. If the athlete, coach or medical adviser resorts to using drugs to assist performance, they are also cheating themselves. If an athlete, coach or medical officer is caught breaking the rules, it could affect their future career in sport as well as bring shame on the sport, their family and friends or harm their own body’s even result in death.

I feel that the use of doping substances or doping methods to enhance performance is cheating, unfair and is contrary to the spirit of fair competition. I feel that performance enhancing drugs are wrong in many ways like the horrible effect they have on the athlete’s body. Also the bad name that it gives to the sport that the athlete cheats at and very importantly the way that young children look up to there favourite athletes and if he/she hears about them taking drugs they may want to try them as well.