Mr. TT

DOPING

Athletes may go round consuming banned performance enhancing drugs to help themselves win something, or perform better. However, many of these athletes just look at how those drugs can help them, and some of their knowledge just comes from word-of-mouth, which may not be true. Very little research is done on the harmful effects when athletes decide to dope. This then leads to the problems that may or will arise.

As we’ve learnt today, take amphetamine as an example, doping can cause lots of health problems. During my presentation, I talked about how such banned substances can affect one’s physiological and psychological state of health. Yes, these drugs may enhance the athletes’ performances, but the long term health effects will affect them greatly too. Cardiovascular problems are just one of the physiological health effects that might arise when doping. Certain drugs trigger an athlete’s heart rate to increase severely and some may have too weak a heart to cope with the change, thus leading to heat attacks. Such health effects may just take the athlete out of the sport, and maybe even death.

Taking steroids for example, people get into what is called, a steroid rage when there’s, maybe, overdose. This may lead to homicidal actions or getting involved in brawls because of the easy agitation. Chris Beniot, a wrestler, went into steroid rage and killed his wife and son, and then ended up committing suicide after that. That was a result of steroid overdose, for the sake of better in-ring performance.

Performance enhancement drugs may be useful in helping athletes build strength and confidence, but there’s just too many risks involved in taking them, which is why WADA has a list of banned substances. Besides helping to maintain fairness in sports, the list also helps to protect the lives of the athletes and their families, in my opinion. So athletes should think twice, and research about such drugs before ever wanting to consume them, and not fall into a trap of dire consequences.