Nothing as It Seems

The article was originally published in Balls.ie  Most fans of sport think that performance-enhancing drugs should be prohibited, and that any athlete who gets caught taking them should be suspended or even banned from competition. Some of the most notorious villains in sport, down through the years, have been involved in high profile drugs scandals: Ben Johnson, Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, and Justin Gatlin. Fans and critics alike have also long suspected that the use of performance enhancing drugs are widespread. A few weeks ago, the Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD published a joint investigation on doping in athletics, which suggested that around a third of medallists at the Olympic Games and World Championships between 2001 and 2012 have recorded suspicious tests. There are, of course, other reasons to suspect that doping is widespread: of all the podium finishers in the Tour de France between 1996 and 2010, around 80 percent are suspected ...

A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , March-April, Vol. 145 (2014)   Should we legalise performance-enhancing drugs in sport? In July this year, American Tyson Gay and Jamaican Asafa Powell (the second and fourth fastest men of all time over 100 meters respectively) tested positive for banned substances.  Other athletes, such as Jamaican sprinter Sherone Simpson and 31 Turkish athletes also failed drugs tests just prior to the Moscow World Championships in August. Further recent drug scandals include the conviction of the sports-doping doctor Eufemiano Fuentes , who claims to be associated with top Spanish football league clubs, a long list of professional cyclists, tennis players, and past London marathon winners. The ruling of the Spanish court to destroy evidence from the Fuentes trial, however, means that we may never ascertain who was involved with his clinic. Over the past few decades, there have been several doping scandals i...