Is there a place for doping in sports?

The Olympics has kicked off in Paris with much fanfare but not without scandal after a few accusations of spying and cheating.

Doping is a hot topic with the hype around the 2025 Enhanced Games so let’s dig in.

Dirtiest race in Olympic history

At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Canadian sprinter, Ben Johnson, had beaten his great rival, Carl Lewis, and set a new world record of 9.79 sec before crashing back to earth with a positive result for stanozolol, an anabolic steroid, three days later.

The International Olympic Committee stripped Johnson of his gold and passed it onto Lewis but Lewis himself had been caught using banned stimulants by the US team in trials. In total, 5 other sprinters in that race were eventually caught doping in their careers too.

It’s now known as the “dirtiest race in history” and led to a significant increase in anti-doping efforts.

Winning no matter the cost

Stanozolol is an “anabolic-androgenic steroid” (AAS), binding to androgen receptors and activating genes involved in muscle synthesis, and has been popular among athletes chasing an edge to build power and explosiveness, especially sprinters and weight-lifters [1].

Even Lance Armstrong used it in his stack with EPO, growth hormone, diuretics and corticosteroids to increase red blood cell production and improve aerobic capacity and endurance [2].

These Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) aren’t for the faint-hearted, especially at the doses athletes in the ’80s were taking, as there are serious risks involved:

• Hormonal imbalances: exogenous hormones can disrupt our natural hormone production and result in infertility, testicular atrophy, and gynecomastia (man boobs)

• Increased cardiovascular risk: increased risk of heart attack, stroke and dyslipidemia

• Liver toxicity: leading to cysts, jaundice and even hepatocellular cancer

• Roid rage: mood swings, aggression and psychiatric disorders

• Dependency and withdrawal: athletes can become physiologically and psychologically dependent on steroids [3]

Sport is a broad church that brings communities together and opinions on doping vary. No PED can ever turn a middling athlete into a medalist so the sheer talent, hard work and dedication should still be admired but it’s still cheating and undermines the integrity of sportsmanship.

Can we ever eliminate doping?

Sports Illustrated ran a survey of almost 200 athletes in 1995 [4], revealing the true nature of the competitive spirit required to reach elite levels:

• 98% said they would take a PED if guaranteed they would win and not be caught

• >50% said they would still take a PED if it meant they would die young, as long as they won all competitions for 5 years and wouldn’t get caught

Seems unlikely we can ever eradicate doping from elite sport so why don’t we accept it…

Is there a place for doping?

The Enhanced Games are launching next year where doping athletes can aspire to smash world records and showcase elite human potential enhanced by PEDs [5].

I’m personally undecided.

I hope the Olympics preserves its prestige…but I’m also a primate who wants to see some freaky stuff…

Perhaps we’re more alike to these doping athletes than we think. Off-label use of prescription medication and even experimental peptides seem to be on the rise among performance and longevity circles.

Life often feels like a constrained optimisation problem and we’re all after an edge; perhaps it just depends on the stakes and the risk appetite.

Would you trade 5 years of life expectancy to be forever jacked and shredded by taking a hypothetical drug? What about 2 years for a 10% improvement in cognitive performance?

Big pharma is investing more and more in life-extending medicine with some eye-catching headlines recently [6] but these substances are not without risk, even the much-hyped Rapamycin needs careful consideration.

Beyond the hypotheticals, our lifestyles already involve inherent trade-offs between everyday performance and longevity, and this goes down to a cellular level with the mTOR pathway and our energy balance between growth and conservation. Perhaps it’s worth a deep dive?

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