Doping - tougher penalties or release?

Doping - tougher penalties or release?

The use of performance-enhancing substances is probably as old as mankind itself. It is probably not just a product of our time that people take certain substances in the hope of improving their sporting (or mental) performance (even if only in their imagination). What has probably been added in recent decades is the widespread use of doping in professional sport. Almost no sport has been spared such cases, which raises the question of how to deal with this problem.

Overall, there are probably few sports in which doping was as widespread as in cycling in the 1990s or around the turn of the millennium. Nevertheless, it is naïve to assume that cycling is the only sport in which some athletes consume banned substances. Just think of weightlifters, track and field athletes or martial artists. There too, athletes have been exposed and banned from time to time due to the use of illegal substances. Most recently, the two Bellator fighters Kimbo Slice and Ken Shamrock failed their respective doping tests - and will probably only have to reckon with a ban of several weeks.

This raises the question of how our society on the one hand and those responsible in professional sport on the other should deal with doping in sport. Although a lot is currently being done and athletes are often convicted of doping, at the same time this does not seem to diminish the general incentive to dope. And especially in the case of top athletes, it is at least partially understandable. They only have a short window of opportunity to perform their sport at a professional level and, at best, to build up a financial cushion. In sports in which you earn reasonably well at the top, there is a not insignificant incentive to gain advantages through illegal substances.

So how should we respond to the doping problem? One possibility would be higher or longer penalties. Anyone found to have a banned substance in their bloodstream could be immediately banned for 5 years. But what if they have ingested the substance z.B. via contaminated food? At first glance, this may sound somewhat abstruse, but it is at least conceivable. These people would possibly be deprived of the basis of their existence, even though they have not knowingly committed a mistake.

Of course, you could also liberalise all doping and stop carrying out tests. What would follow? Athletes pumped full of performance-enhancing substances. Whoever had the better pharmaceutical department would win. Is that still the point of a sporting competition? Probably not.

What remains is the possibility of making the control network even tighter. Even more controls for athletes, even more complex tests to be able to quickly identify new substances in the blood. There should actually be enough revenue in international professional sport to pay for such changes. Let's wait and see what happens in this area over the next few years. At the moment, the battle of the anti-doping hunters still resembles that of Don Quixote against the proverbial windmills.