No doping - no drama

The contribution “It´s not the winning but the taking part that counts” talks about ethics in sports in general. This discourse will follow this line dealing with a concrete issue of this topic: Doping!
The international Anti-Doping agency (WADA) defines Doping as the presence of prohibited substances in athletes samples, the use or possession of prohibited substances and the administering of prohibited substances to athletes. So why is doping prohibited? According to the international volleyball-federation , doping is considered to cause danger to the health of athletes. It is also prohibited, because it undermines the pursuit of human and sporting excellence and to protect “clean” athletes from other athletes taking advantage through doubtful or even harmful substances. These motives seem reasonable, but at the same time ridiculous, as already the Greek and Roman used substances like mushrooms to improve their sporting performance [1]. In the last decades the way to dope became more and more high chemical technology. That´s why Yi Jiandong from Beijing University, think the competition is transferred from the sports sector to the laboratories [2]. But may be doping is not that bad. Modern societies use every kind of scientific progress to improve their (economic) performance – so why not also in sports? There are differences in the way to access doping substances, because of economic or social differences, but these exist also in the “economic world” [2]. To allow drugs or other body modification, would immediately give an advantage to athletes (or their sponsors) with more money to spend on it [3]. This is not the case. Instead, the efforts of detecting drugs are high, but this also implies that the amount of false positive is high, too. According to the BBC Ethics guide, “testing is made more difficult because some drugs are broken down quickly inside the body. The only way to detect the drug is to look for the chemicals it is broken down into. But the athlete can protest that these secondary chemicals may be the products of another bodily process. It is sometimes hard to prove one way or another.” This will maintain the question, if it is ethical allowable/convenient, if a athlete is tested positive on drugs? Some opinions say, that “If drugs (or any currently-illegal tactics) were allowed, as long as everyone had equal access to them the sport would still be fair” [3]. If some athletes decide not to use legal drugs – reasons do not matter – it would be their own fault, to have a disadvantage. Yi Jiandong sees this kind of statement as a defense of doping and thinks, that people with this opinion do not have a ethical understanding of sports and condemn pure morality [2]. Each one has to decide if he confirms or denies Yi Jiandongs statement and state his or her own opinion [2].

Further Information:

http://fulltext.ausport.gov.au/fulltext/1999/nsw/p141-147.pdf

http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Fight_against_doping/World_Anti_Doping_Agency/2009_World_Anti_Doping_Code-EN.pdf

http://www.asociaciondedeportistas.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/WADA_AG_ENG_2010_FINAL.pdf

Biblography:

[1] http://www.teachpe.com/drugs/drugs.php

[2] http://www.wada-ama.org/rtecontent/document/The_Ethics_and_Moral_Strategy_Dr_Yi_Jian_Dong.pdf

[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/sport/