Washington D.C., Aug 18, 2016 / 02:02 am
As the world's eyes are on Rio de Janeiro for last days of the 2016 Summer Olympics, the topic of performance-enhancing drugs has also jumped back into the spotlight amid several high-profile controversies.
Along with the increased publicity surrounding the prevalence of drug use among athletes come questions about why "doping" or the use of such substances is wrong, and how to address a problem whose roots are almost as old as sport itself.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, Director of Education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA that athletes in a competition come to the starting line with a kind of equality, "in the sense that they arrive with whatever they were endowed with at birth, and whatever they may have managed to become endowed with through practice, hard work, and discipline."
"Cheating through doping involves an attempt to step outside these rules and suppositions, and play a different game," he said.
When athletes come to the starting line, they come with the supposition that they are playing on a level playing field, that no one has an unfair advantage over anyone else. Doping lets athletes pretend this is the cases, even if performance-enhancing drugs or procedures gives an unnatural athlete an edge other competitors.
"In this sense, cheating through doping is wrong because it is a form of lying," Fr. Pacholczyk added.
In a competitive athletic situation, the setup and supposition is that competitors are on a par with each other, which means that no one has an "unfair" or "unjust" advantage over another going into the competition.
Doping's history at the Olympic Games reaches back thousands of years, as ancient competitors would eat strange meats and body parts to gain an edge over their opponents. (Some of these practices, such as the consumption of raw animal testicles before races may not have been completely scientifically unfounded, though certainly less effective than modern doping methods.)
Artificial enhancement followed the Olympics to the reinstatement of the Modern Olympic games. Famously, in 1904, American marathon winner Thomas Hicks was given shots of strychnine – a stimulant and common rat poison – along with sips of brandy by his coach during the race.
The use of performance enhancing drugs proliferated throughout the mid-Twentieth Century, as the lengths athletes took to gain an advantage became more extreme and ubiquitous. In the 1990's, after the fall of the Soviet Union, documents emerged detailing the extent of anabolic steroid and other performance-enhancing drug use by some of the the East German sports teams. Former athletes attested that they were given what they were told were "vitamins" at ages as young as eleven, with no option to refuse the substances.
The use of artificial enhancements has come under increasing scrutiny since 1962, when the International Olympic Commission, or IOC, began developing a list of prohibited substances and, later, tests. In 1999, the IOC formed the World Anti-Doping Agency, a foundation dedicated to the monitoring of the use of drugs in sports and coordinate efforts to end the practice among competitors. Now, athletes are subject to routine blood and urine testing for a wide array of substances.
Some of the substances banned by WADA pose serious risks to athletes. Anabolic steroids can cause liver damage, dangerous structural changes to the heart, and abnormal physical characteristics such as breast growth in men and and hair growth in women. Stimulants, like amphetamines and ephedrine, can cause rapid muscle breakdown, high blood pressure and rapid heart rates, and are the cause of the only drug-related Olympic death, when Danish Cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen collapsed during the 1960 Games in Rome.
Blood doping, or the alteration of the blood's capacity to carry oxygen, either through drugs or blood transfusions, also carries with it significant risks. The increased blood volume thickens the blood, which in turn increases the risk of life-threatening blood clots, strokes and heart attacks.
However, while these drugs can be dangerous, some of the substances banned or restricted by WADA also have legitimate therapeutic uses. Common drugs such as asthma rescue inhalers, heart medications and common over-the-counter cold medicines are all found on the list of prohibited substances for athletes at the 2016 Olympics.
While some of the substances are only banned over certain limits or for certain sports, the inclusion of these substances with legitimate therapeutic uses introduces not only a plausible excuse for athletes such as Yulia Effimova – who was allowed to swim at in Rio after testing positive for the heart medication meldonium*, banned earlier this year – but clouds the moral waters as well, says Fr. Pacholczyk.
"The fact that some of the banned substances used among Olympic athletes may have legitimate therapeutic uses complicates the determination of whether steroids are being used for illegitimate purposes," he told CNA.
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"In some cases, it may not be possible to distinguish such differences via standardized testing protocols," Fr. Pacholczyk continued, adding that it may be necessary and appropriate for sport authorities to set detection levels for a drug's use at a given limit. If an athlete passes that limit, whether or not a drug's use was for an injury or treatment of health issue, the athlete should sit out the next competition, he suggested.
"Injuries, obviously, must be properly attended to through standard treatments, even though one consequence may be that competitive athletic activities may need to cease, at least for a period."
*In July 2016, the world swimming association, FINA, ruled to allow Efimova to compete in the 2016 Rio Games despite testing positive for the heart medication, noting that it is currently unclear how long meldonium stays in a patient's body, even after stopping its use.
