Is it all related to long term side-effects where the sports organization is attempting to keep the athletes safe down the line, or is there a hard line from a scientific standpoint where a drug goes from legal to illegal in the eyes of an organization like the IOC, and if so what’s the line?
In: Biology
basically, it all comes down to what the governing body decides based on research or their judgement or whatever. it’s not always necessarily logical. just because you take PED’s doesn’t mean you can not work out and perform better. those guys are probably working out harder than the people who don’t.
if you play video games. the people who take PED’s are like the top 0.00001% with the ultra rare super legendary drops and have multiple alts so the guild can form the best optimal combo for every single encounter and min/max the hell out of it. the casuals will just never be able to compete, so the GM’s decide to ban that shit.
being an Olympic athlete or top performing athlete is as in part about how much money you can spend on trainers, medical stuff, dietitians, etc and not just working out or practicing. everything they do is super focused.
Nothing, really, WADA is a bit of scam and we should not fund it at all. Sport is nowhere near important enough to justify having a multi-country agency making sure some athlete doesn’t get an ‘unfair’ advantage.
WADA tried to ban caffeine once (it has been proven to improve performance) but it was too logistically sticky and they got rid of the ban.
It is increasingly apparent that it is really a weird sense of morality that determines whether something is banned or not. Really, guys are buying helmets that shock their scalp because they think it will make them better. Why isn’t that banned? I haven’t heard one really good reason why we should even ban PEDs in the first place. It made TdF much more exciting.
One (e.g. anabolic steroids) has been clearly shown to result in a performance benefit while the other gives you expensive urine (vitamin supplements) and has no tangible athletic benefit on performance.
There is also a grey area for some substances, where use is not banned but amounts above a certain level are. Caffeine is a good example. You can have a couple cups of coffee equivalent, but if you start popping caffeine pills that will get you sanctioned.
Taking a vitamin supplement is just bolstering your nutritional intake. You still have to do the work of going to the gym and working out to gain muscle mass and improve your performance.
Taking a performance enhancing drug that affects your hormones is different. It affects the actual brain chemistry and alters your internal biology, allowing the drug to do some of the work that normally takes an athlete effort, time, commitment, and literal sweat and hard work to accomplish.
The legality of drugs is generally related to whether or not taking them gives the athlete a performance advantage over someone who was physically equivalent, and put in the same effort, but didn’t take the drug. The most commonly referred to PED is of course steroids, because they actually alter the levels of testosterone in the blood and stimulate muscle tissue in the body to grow larger and stronger.
Lawyer. From our perspective, the distinction is legal in nature. I’m a little biased but there is no scientific definition of a PED. It’s a category of substances which could include anything. It’s a legal distinction (maybe I should say legalistic) in the sense that regulating substances and activities, and substances in activities, requires a certain balance between precision in a rules applicability but generality with respect to subject matter. So when you see phrases like “precision enhancing drug” that is a considered attempt to create a phrase that captures some substances but not others. For example if you were to ban all “pills,” an athlete could get bounced for taking aspirin. But if you ban all “liquid injectible angrogenic compounds blah blah blah” you’ve effectively taken one PED out of the race but the law permits identical if differently composed substances. So you land in the middle with mealy mouthed dogshit like PED, which means not quite everything but also nothing. The point is to leave some wiggle room over what can be banned because drugs evolve and new ones come out all the time. The rule stays the same and it’s application is subject to human judgment over what constitutes a PED, which I think is a better way to do things that to try and change the law every time a new compound makes its way out of some former soviet chem lab. If you want to see how well that approach works take a look at the US Code’s attempts to keep up with designer drug analogues.
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