Blood Doping Pros And Cons

There may be natural unfair advantages in sports, but when taking performance-enhancing drugs, athletes gain an unfair advantage not needed in sports. PEDs create many advantages deemed unfair, one of which is endurance, achieved through blood doping. Rather than increasing their endurance through training and exercising, athletes turn to blood doping. Erythropoietin (EPO) is the most common form of blood doping. This steroid increases oxygen movement throughout the muscles to improve stamina and endurance. Blood doping boosts red blood cell numbers, which are used to transport oxygen to muscles from the lungs, and more oxygen in the blood will improve endurance (“NIDA Blog Team”). Blood doping has a huge impact on athletes and gives an unfair

advantage, rather than improving their talent by themselves. Stimulants are used to improve endurance and stamina by increasing the heart rate and blood pressure (“Performance Enhancing Drugs”). Those who dope use PEDs to get better rather than putting in the work for themselves. Steroids have a gift when it pertains to increasing muscle. When doping, muscle is gained while also increasing leanness rather than doing the work clean, without drugs (“Performance Enhancing Drugs - Advantages”). Unclean athletes, those who use steroids, take shortcuts to skip all the work. These drugs also affect training, allowing users to make the most of the little time being put in.

Steroids allow training to be effective, taking the results away from an individual's own ability (“Performance Enhancing Drugs”). Athletes who do not use drugs earn so much more of their money since they have to work so much harder to stay on the same level as users. Drug users boost their performance in unfair ways through shortcuts that clean athletes have absolutely no way of competing with.

Performance-enhancing drugs are not allowed in sports, but if they were, many athletes would be pressured into doping. In sports, athletes would have the tough choice of taking PEDs or not competing. Athletes love to compete, but not all want to risk their lives in the process. If athletes become allowed to use drugs, the rest will have to decide between using drugs too, or dropping out of the sport because they will not be as effective as those who are on PEDs (“Does the Use...”). Drugs risk lives for every pill or shot, and not all athletes are for that. If any athletes decide to use PEDs, the rest will need to as well. Coaches have admitted that athletes need to dope to be highly competitive in all levels of sports (“Does the Use...”). Even coaches around the world have admitted that allowing drugs

would mean that the professionals would need to use drugs or get out of the game, no other option. If steroids were to become allowed, athletes would be extremely coerced by their desire and need to win. As reported by Sports Illustrated, "half of all recently surveyed Olympic athletes admitted that they would be willing to take a drug -- even if it would kill them eventually -- as long as it would let them win every event they entered five years in a row." This type of winning necessity leads to athletes feeling coerced into using banned substances just to stay with everyone else (“Does the Use...”). Athletes are obsessed with winning, which is not positive for sports. Coercion is definitely in sports where success can be measured in a fraction of an inch, a pound, or a second, and that miniscule portion is the difference between success and failure. And, for athletes, it is not just about winning and the success that comes with, but the players get employed to win, and that their future depends solely on just that, winning. Under these standards, the decision to or to not take PEDs is absolutely not an individual's choice (“Does the Use...”). Athletes get money for winning by those miniscule margins, so athletes would have to take drugs if they would want to get paid. If PEDs became legalized in professional sports, it would have a gigantic impact on high school and college athletes. A whopping 77 percent of males, when surveyed, said that if PEDs were allowed in sports, that it “puts pressure on young athletes to use drugs to get ahead” (“Do Teens...”). High schoolers and college students do not need more issues to worry about. Young professional athletes already have enough pressure to live up to their expectations or to make the doubters pay, they do not need drugs to add to all that pressure. On February 9, 2009, Alex Rodriguez gave a speech on performance-enhancing drugs, in which he stated, "When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me, and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day. And I wanted to prove to everyone that, you know, I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time. And I did take a banned substance." (“Does the Use...”). Alex Rodriguez was pressured into doping and PEDs were not even allowed, so just imagine if drugs were made legal in sports. For drugs to become allowed in sports, many changes would need to be made, careers would be ruined, and money would be lost.
Sports associations should not allow performance-enhancing drugs because of how it will affect the athletes and the public.

There are a multitude of long-term and short-term health effects, the athletes would all be negatively affecting others as role models, receive an unfair advantage that others could not compete with, and be coerced into using performance-enhancing drugs. PED use is becoming a huge issue in sports as more people are doping every year and ruining sports for the rest of the world. Performance-enhancing drugs may boost performance, but it comes at a cost, not only to athletes, but to friends, family, those who look up in need of a role model, and for the future of all

sports.