Have Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED’s) ruined Sports?
Allow me to first mention: I am not pro drugs sport, I am not against drugs in sport; I as a person am very pro to people doing what they want with it. If you want to do drugs good for you, if you don’t, good for you also. These are the opinions and arguments of one person. Let’s do a break down starting with, bodybuilding. Body building Bodybuilding- this sport was made on the use of anabolic steroids! Everybody that is in the pro circuit of bodybuilding takes some sort of performance enhancing drugs- it’s a fact, the only bodybuilders who don’t are the “natural” bodybuilders. A lot of “natural bodybuilders” come under scrutiny from many people due to their impressive physical stature! I suppose this answers the question ‘have PED’s ruined sport’ for this particular sport! Doesn’t it? It’s a yes and a no. It made the sport what it is today, but on the non-performance enhancement competition, the competitors often face scrutiny, that they cannot be that impressive without certain help from outside sources. Bodybuilders do everything right when it comes to being big. Those guys and girls, whether they take performance enhancement drugs or not, are unbelievably disciplined in what they do: their workouts, their conditioning and their diet- it not a feat that can be obtained by just the use of steroids. A lot of people think that you can just take steroids and be huge and that’s it, which is not the case. Made in Chelsea star, Spencer Matthews, came out in the news and said that he has a drug problem with anabolic steroids. Looking at a picture of Spencer Matthews, you will see that he is in good shape, no doubt about it, but he isn’t huge and he isn’t as physically brilliant as natural bodybuilders. After viewing a few Made in Chelsea episodes, it’s mainly down to the fact he isn’t committed to the cause of getting big for stage, as his lifestyle (purely judging on the show) is a party one. Bodybuilder’s diets and lifestyles are incredibly organised and they are committed to winning shows. Hopefully this adds a little perspective to that matter. What I am getting at with bodybuilding is that the sport is mainly drug based. Would the sport be as big without it? In my opinion- no, not at all and for that reason in this case, I would say that performance enhancing drugs did not ruin sport… in bodybuilding’s case anyway. That said there are a number of health concerns that go along with taking PHD’s and this is widely known in the body building world and steroids have a lot to answer for when it comes to heart problems as well as HGH (human growth hormone) because they can cause horrible side effects later in life. Despite this lots of people still take them and believe that there is a way to safely take steroids, but the sport continues to grow so the sport isn’t ruined. The number of people addicted to steroids and deaths from steroids have gone up over the years, which is obviously a horrific thing, but my argument is if people were taught how to use them maybe there wouldn’t be such a problem and if these people using them were getting them from proper sources it would make it safer, as they would know exactly where the product has come. Lance Armstrong This gentleman is very well known for winning the Tour de France 7 times- 7! Also well known for his charitable work in cancer as he himself was diagnosed with it, but came back to win a Tour de France, which on Performance Enhancing drugs or not is amazing in my book. Lance Armstrong on drugs or not won 7 Tour de France competitions, which is no easy feat as anybody that has watched the Tour de France will tell you. Was it wrong for the competition? Of course it was. It was identified that he had a banned substance but was what he achieved any less impressive? In my opinion no. 7 Tour de France competitions is an insane achievement, even if you’re taking fairy dust. Cyclists in the competition have admitted since that they were also on the same substance. Does that make it okay? Of course not, it’s a banned substance! But it’s the same as mentioned above, you can take these substances but without training and diet they still won’t work as well. Mr Armstrong, I imagine, was on a gruelling training regime and perfect diet plan to be able to obtain his 7 Tour de France titles Did his cheating make the sport any worse? I’d have to say no. I imagine for the athletes the rigorous drug tests are horrendous because of it, but as an American winner Lance Armstrong will have made the sport massive in America. Americans are very patriotic and they would be happy to celebrate what he had done (before he was found out) but what else could he have done for the sport? Well, people who went on PED’s probably should have won so he stripped them of their winnings, which is never nice as everybody trained as hard as they could for the competition. From a moral stand point, it is definitely wrong. Those athletes where robbed of what should have been theirs because they did not have access to a drug programme. In my opinion that’s what it is. There is so much money to be made from doing well in sports, if somebody came up to you and said take this, it will make you the best in the world at what you do and you will be a millionaire- there is a chance people will find out you have taken a substance though and they may not like it, for a lot of athletes the pros definitely outweigh the cons. Athletes have the mind set of anything to win! Not all of them, but a lot of them. Some of the have different mind sets like “I’ll prove you can do it without drugs,” and that determination is admirable and brilliant. Athletes manage to get through on their determination which again, is why we applaud them. That said has anybody won 7 Tour de France competitions since? A lot of people believe that Tour de France puts such a strain on athletes body that It cannot be done without drugs, that PED’s are the only way to do it, this is a way that drugs have ruined the sport! It takes away from peoples genuine achievements, that they had worked so hard to achieve! A few people have cheated so it is believed, and there is no way you can’t be on PED’s. People also believe that the reason not everybody is caught is that PED’s are being made faster than ways to test them are being made, which is a valid point, you can see that by the shear amount of different types of drugs. To summarise Did it ruin the sport- the morals are wrong, people come under scrutiny as to whether they can achieve those feats of brilliance naturally and there are a lot of adverse health effects that prolonged use of drugs can do to the body, but lance Armstrong’s wins led to a large amount of people following the sport, he developed his on charity for people with cancer, made the sport more rigorously tested for the future, so there are definitely pros and cons to it, I’ll let you decide yourself but for me as long as a sport continues to grow it’s getting better! So for that reason alone I don’t think it ruined the sport and actually made it better. Cyclists This is a sub category as I have spoken about one person in the sport but that is mainly because he is probably the biggest person that was in the sport and one of the biggest people in sport ever due to his accomplishments, he is not the only person who has used PED’s. It has been reported that cyclists are frequently caught out by doping to improve performance. One set of Olympic cyclists (I won’t name the country) won the competition, they were later found dead, in an autopsy it was found that their blood had the consistency of ketchup. What had happened was they had taken a hormone in drug form that is usually found in pregnant women in order to improve their aerobic abilities. What this did was made their blood so thick that it couldn’t move through the body properly and eventually caused them to all have heart attacks and die. Now again this is morally wrong and at the time I don’t imagine it did a lot for the sport of cycling so in this instance I would have to say that drugs have definitely ruined the sport. Gymnastics There have been a lot of cases in gymnastics not necessarily of drugs but of the effects of pregnancy in gymnastics. Obviously in this case I am referring to the lady gymnasts. There are particular physical benefits from pregnancy that can be used to a gymnasts advantage. When pregnant, in the first three months of pregnancy a woman’s body produces a natural surplus of red blood cells, obviously this is a type of legal blood doping and can have very positive anaerobic effects as the more blood cells you have, the more oxygen can be carried. This is normally down to the body producing a better environment for fetal growth. Other things that it can do is regulate the hormones such as progesterone, oestrogen and testosterone, which can increase muscular strength. Another hormone that is released is elastin, this hormone allows for more flexibility at the hips for when the baby eventually comes out and this improve elasticity of all soft tissues (muscles and ligaments), all of which is of large benefit to gymnasts as they have to have strength and power while being supple. This is considered natural benefits from natural causes, as there are no bans on getting pregnant, which I agree with- you can get pregnant if you want, the problems come from a moral stand point here and they can be quite controversial. Women are getting pregnant in order to improve their performance and win gold medals, then when competition is over they’re going and having those pregnancies aborted. I’ll let you decide what you think about that, as there are a lot of different views on abortion to begin with, I am very pro to people doing what they want with their bodies but something about this doesn’t quite sit right with me. Of course the argument can be made that people take drugs and that is also morally wrong but then I guess my argument would be nobody died in order to obtain those victories. Getting pregnant for the purpose of abortion to me seems a little disgusting. Although none of these allegations have been proved, the idea of it isn’t a brilliant one in my eyes, but then like I said earlier athletes are willing to do anything to win and that is part of anything. To summarise This is technically legal and there is no way to stop it, although in my opinion morally wrong to do so, does it make the sport worse? It allows females to be better at their sport and grow the female sport industry as a whole, so for the sport it can be considered that it is beneficial, although the controversy that it causes around the subject could in fact cause the sport to diminish depending on how strongly opinionated people are on the subject. Conclusion There are a lot of other drugs that are used in sports and a lot of different drug scandals out there. The question – do PED’s ruin sports? In terms of performance no, not one bit! They make it a million times better, they allow athletes in their short careers to earn a lot of money by being the best they can possibly be. Sport is all about spectators and in this instance when people achieve records, such as winning Tour de France 7 times, people believe it is brilliant, and they’re right. The problems that come are the moral dilemmas and the health risks associated with taking drugs in sports. There are a lot of people that have contracted disease from blood doping and health issues from taking PED’s. Nowadays everybody knows the risks and what the risks might be and they take it anyway because it is worth it to them. It is an extremely personal choice to athletes and, they make that choice, full well knowing that it can hurt their career if found out and it can destroy their body because the rewards that they’re given are worth it! So in this instance, is it the drugs that are ruining the sport or is it the amount of rewards given? Are the rewards so much that people don’t mind being called a cheat, or a fake? Performance enhancing drugs cause sports to grow until people are found out, people have idols with in sport and it isn’t necessarily that they themselves compete in sport but they admire what people achieve within it and see how hard they have worked, this gives rise to fandom and then people end up trying the sport that the person the admire do = growing the sport! When that person gets found out that they have taken PED’s the people that supported them feel betrayed, a lot of the time. All of the pros and cons are relayed here on this website next to all the different drugs that are also banned from competition http://sportsanddrugs.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002037 you will find that a lot of them have horrible side effects and that can in fact lead to death, which is why some of these substances are banned substances. If one good thing is to come out of people being on a “drug programme” it is that they are constantly monitored through what they take and have the best care possible. If steroids were less of a black market thing, people would get proper steroids and know what they are and they would know how much to use in order to get desired effects and potentially not have as many young deaths from the substance. Regardless of whether you think it is wrong or right to do drugs in sport, there is no denying the amount of effort athletes put into being the best at what they do!
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