Performance Enhancing Drugs In Sport

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Performance enhancing drugs are substances or methods that can be used to improve the performance of humans during any physical activity. According to WADA, a substance is prohibited when it has any of the following characteristics: the potential to enhance or enhances sport performance, it represents an actual or potential health risk to an athlete or that it violates the spirit of sport. (USADA (2017) WADA Prohibited list, Available at:https://www.usada.org/substances/prohibited-list/ ) During the Essendon Football Club’s supplements program in 2012 that became one of the sports longest running sagas. Many of the clubs players were found to be injected with banned peptides. Peptides are natural biological or artificially manufactured short …show more content…

The physical issues of using the peptides - AOD-9604, colostrum,tribulus and thymosin beta-4 , that were administered during the Essendon Drug scandal, are hypertension, blood cancers/ leukaemia, strokes, heart attacks, feminization, thyroid problems and many other physical issues that could harm the athletes that were injected with them. (USADA (2017) Effects of PEDS, Available at:https://www.usada.org/substances/effects-of-performance-enhancing-drugs/) . There are number of emotional issues that are caused by performance enhancing drugs. For Hal Hunter, he was incredibly upset when his dreams of being a professional footballer were crushed by the drug scandal, as were many other of the footballers. The Club treated him with disrespect, unimportance and as if he were a rookie. Hal does still not have the answers to all the questions that he has asked. He fulfilled his part of the contract, which was coming to training, abiding by the rules etc. In addition, the club did not fulfil their duty of care for him or any of the other footballers in the club. This causes a lot of stress and anger for the …show more content…

This is because if the athletes take the performance enhancing drugs, it makes it unfair for the other competitors, as they do not have the same performance advantages as the drug fuelled athletes and is basically cheating.According to David Fairchild, “the use of performance enhancers is cheating because it violates constitutive rules of the activity. Since such use is cheating, it is wrong and we should expect the disqualification of competitors who are caught doping. This conclusion is established through a simple and straightforward argument. Cheating is the deliberate, knowing, and voluntary violation of certain constitutive rules in order to gain a competitive advantage. Since the violation is knowing, the attempt to gain an advantage is illegitimate and unethical, and the advantage sought is thus unfair. The knowing and voluntary use of proscribed substances is an attempt to gain such an unfair advantage. Some specified performance enhancers, anabolic steroids for example, are listed as proscribed substances in certain sports. The deliberate use of steroids is thus an illegitimate attempt to gain an unfair advantage. We conclude that their use is cheating." (David Fairchild (2008) Do Athletes Gain an Unfair Advantage by Using Performance Enhancing Drugs? Available at: https://sportsanddrugs.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001236). Another reason is that it

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