The Olympics and Blood Doping
The Olympics are not known to be a clean event to any degree. What would you expect when you have all of the world’s top athletes in one place? Athletes have been taught from a young age to win no matter the consequences. The Olympics provide an environment where performance enhancing drugs are everywhere you look. What do the Olympic officials do about this? Close to nothing. The tests seem to be very inconsistent and rarely reliable. The Olympics are full of athletes using performance enhancing drugs and there isn’t much the officials or athletes are or want to do anything about it. Blood doping is becoming more and more common in all athletics. So what exactly is blood doping? “taking drugs to improve athletic performance. This form of cheating is also known as “doping””(“Know Your” 6). So doping is basically using performance enhancing drugs to help athletes win in their sport. Doping is considered cheating in sports. This is because it gives one person an unfair advantage …show more content…
“Jensen’s death in 1960 convinced the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that drug use among athletes had to be stopped. But the IOC’s determination has been outstripped by the willingness of athletes” (Hamilton and Lewis 62). Again this is an example of how much the athletes are willing to use drugs. “Athletes have stayed well ahead of the IOC’s “doping controls,” ingesting ever more powerful and hard-to-detect drugs. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where 10,500 athletes competed, a state-of-the-art drug lab reported only two positive tests for banned substances” (Hamilton and Lewis 62). Even though it was a state of the art lab it only caught two athletes that were using drugs when in all reality there was probably many more athletes on drugs at the time. The technology and the officials are behind their athletes and they are taking advantage of
The Olympics are not known to be a clean event to any degree. What would you expect when you have all of the world’s top athletes in one place? Athletes have been taught from a young age to win no matter the consequences. The Olympics provide an environment where performance enhancing drugs are everywhere you look. What do the Olympic officials do about this? Close to nothing. The tests seem to be very inconsistent and rarely reliable. The Olympics are full of athletes using performance enhancing drugs and there isn’t much the officials or athletes are or want to do anything about it. Blood doping is becoming more and more common in all athletics. So what exactly is blood doping? “taking drugs to improve athletic performance. This form of cheating is also known as “doping””(“Know Your” 6). So doping is basically using performance enhancing drugs to help athletes win in their sport. Doping is considered cheating in sports. This is because it gives one person an unfair advantage …show more content…
“Jensen’s death in 1960 convinced the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that drug use among athletes had to be stopped. But the IOC’s determination has been outstripped by the willingness of athletes” (Hamilton and Lewis 62). Again this is an example of how much the athletes are willing to use drugs. “Athletes have stayed well ahead of the IOC’s “doping controls,” ingesting ever more powerful and hard-to-detect drugs. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where 10,500 athletes competed, a state-of-the-art drug lab reported only two positive tests for banned substances” (Hamilton and Lewis 62). Even though it was a state of the art lab it only caught two athletes that were using drugs when in all reality there was probably many more athletes on drugs at the time. The technology and the officials are behind their athletes and they are taking advantage of