There is an increasing urge to push past the present limits and achieve superhuman limits in the sports and athletics world. This may be driven by general competition in the sport or even by money. To get to these limits, athletes have been using doping agents for a long time now. Doping agents are defined as performance-enhancing substances that provide an unfair advantage to their users. There are over 200 substances and procedures that fall under this category, defined by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
A major doping scandal at the 1998 Tour de France underlined the need for an independent international agency to set standards in anti-doping work. As a result, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was formed the following year. Most recently, the Russian athletics team was banned from the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro because of a secret government program of giving steroids to Russian athletes at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and covering up the evidence of cheating. Most commonly used agents vary: anabolic steroids, which allow athletes to train harder, recover more quickly and build more muscle; stimulants, which make athletes more alert and can overcome the effects of fatigue by increasing heart-rate and blood flow; diuretics and masking agents are used to remove fluid from the body, which help in losing weight in a short period.
There are several side effects of these drugs which include heart failure, baldness, low sperm count, kidney failure among several others. Therefore, the long-term harm caused by such substances by far exceeds the short-term benefits they may provide. Adding to that, there are strict implications for whoever is found guilty in competitive sports. The rules and detection techniques are getting stricter to eradicate this phenomenon from sports. Rui Li from the Northeastern University suggests that gene doping is the newest technique and battling it is a huge concern for WADA, as they suggest that it represents a threat to the integrity of sport and the health of athletes.
Harman Singh