The story of athletes ‘from the dawn’ of time attempting to enhance their performance is a colorful history. Recorded history speaks of ancient Greek athletes munching on animal testicles to extract testosterone or athletes taking small doses of various poisons as ‘stimulants.’ In 1927, the Nobel Prize was won by a German — Heinrich Weiland — discoverer of ‘steroids’ and athletics has never been the same …until now.
Today, there are rumors of ‘gene doping’. Simply stated, gene doping is the insertion of a performance gene into the athlete via a virus. So far this has proven to be a dangerous process with some non athletic deaths from introducing genes into the human body. The one of the genes likely to be introduced is is associated with EPO. The other gene — associated with certain rare strong athletes — is a form of non fatal muscular dystrophy.
Trying to ‘get an edge’ over a competitor — by any means — is certainly not new and working to provide ‘ a level playing field’ is certainly a worthy but somewhat unrealistic effort. The ‘solution’ to this problem will come from the athlete. The question each athlete has to ask themselves is how good do I want to become and at what cost? There are plenty of athletes who appear to be suffering from the effects of anabolic steroid use of 20 or 30 years ago. Some of the apparent problems that have developed with athletes who dined on steroids are liver & kidney problems and joint replacement and death. Some of these same fellows often find themselves in wheel chairs. Do they think it was worth it now? Continue reading “Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports? … are you really surprised?”