Performance-Enhancing Drugs

Why performers use prohibited PEDs

Cambridge lists ten reasons, and they are not all about getting stronger. Learn them as a set, then attach one example to each, because that is what turns a list into an answer.

Notice that several of the reasons are about pressure rather than gain: the performer who believes everyone else is using takes drugs to stay level, and the performer under pressure to win uses them to keep a contract or a place in the team.

Consequences for the individual

Consequences for the individual are health, sanctions, money and reputation. Health comes first, and it is the one that lasts.

Prohibited substances are used at doses far above any medical use and without medical supervision, so the risks are serious and sometimes permanent. Performers can also damage themselves indirectly: masking pain lets them compete on an injury that then gets worse, and pushing training harder than the body can recover from leads to overtraining and breakdown.

Then come the sanctions. A proven violation usually means disqualification from the event, loss of the medal or placing, loss of prize money, and a period of ineligibility that can run for years — long enough to end a career. Sponsors withdraw, contracts are cancelled and the performer is publicly identified.

• Health: organ damage, hormonal disruption, heart problems, raised blood pressure, liver and kidney damage, mood and behaviour changes; blood doping thickens the blood and raises the risk of clotting and heart problems.
• Injury: masking pain so an injury is made worse, plus higher injury rates from training harder than the body can cope with.
• Sanctions: disqualification of results, loss of medals and prize money, and a period of ineligibility or a lifetime ban.
• Money and career: loss of sponsorship, contracts, funding and earnings, and loss of the career they trained for.
• Reputation: public humiliation, loss of respect, and a permanent association with cheating.
• Psychological: anxiety about being caught, guilt, and, in some cases, dependence on the substance.

Consequences for the sport

The consequences for the sport are about integrity and income. A sport in which performers are known to be doping loses the thing that makes competition worth watching: that the best performance won on the day.

When results are doubtful, spectators and audiences disengage, and if they do, sponsors and broadcasters reduce what they are willing to pay. Funding for the sport falls, competitions lose profile, and money that would have gone into coaching and facilities has to be spent on testing and legal cases.

There is also an internal cost. Clean performers have been cheated out of medals and income, so some of them leave the sport, and the performers who remain are under pressure to take the same risks. Records set by doping performers make honest performances look second rate, and results that are later voided devalue the competition itself.

• Loss of integrity: results and records are no longer trusted, so the competition becomes less meaningful.
• Loss of reputation and credibility for the sport and its governing body.
• Reduced sponsorship, broadcasting income and funding, because companies do not want to be linked to a doping sport.
• Money diverted into testing, investigations and legal cases rather than facilities, coaching and grassroots development.
• Clean performers are cheated of medals and earnings, and may leave the sport.
• Bad example to participants at the base of the pyramid, who see doping as the way to succeed.

Consequences for society

The consequences for society follow from the fact that performers are visible. Elite performers are role models for young people, so doping at the top sets the expectation that the way to succeed is to take a substance rather than to train.

Trust in sport is part of public life — spectators, parents, sponsors and young participants all rely on the assumption that the competition is honest. When that trust goes, sport's contribution to health, social contact and national pride is weakened, and public money that supports sport becomes harder to justify.

There are also practical costs: drugs can spread from elite sport into the wider population of young people and amateur participants, and the performer's own health problems later become a cost to families and to health services.

• Young people copy what they see, so elite doping normalises drug use and shows that cheating pays.
• Loss of trust in sport and in the honesty of results, which weakens sport's contribution to social cohesion and national pride.
• Public and commercial money spent on sport becomes harder to justify, so funding and participation are affected.
• Performers' health problems become a cost carried by families and public health services.
• Doping spreads beyond elite sport as amateurs and young participants follow the same idea.

The ethical and health arguments against their use

Cambridge asks you to evaluate strategies, and you cannot do that without the arguments those strategies rest on.

The central argument is fairness. Sport is a test of training, technique and judgement between performers who follow the same rules. A performer who takes a prohibited substance is not just better prepared; they have stepped outside the contest, so they have cheated everyone who stayed inside it, including their teammates and opponents.

The second argument is health. The performer is the person who carries the harm, and many of these substances cause damage that does not appear until after the career has finished. Where pressure to win is strong, and especially where performers are young, that harm is not a free choice.

The third argument is example. Elite performers are looked up to, so a doped performance is also a lesson taught to everyone watching, and it works its way down to young and amateur participants. The counter-argument is that the fault lies partly with the system: where the rewards are enormous and the pressure to win comes from the coach, the sport or the money, blaming only the individual treats a structural problem as a personal failure.

• Cheating and unfairness: the performer gains an advantage the rules prohibit and that other performers have not taken.
• Health risk: unknown, unsupervised doses cause serious and sometimes permanent harm to the performer.
• Coerced choices: young performers under pressure to win may be pushed into using by coaches, teams or contracts.
• Role model effect: visible doping teaches young people that cheating is the route to success.
• Damage to the sport's meaning: a doped result is not a measurement of human performance, so the contest loses its point.

Strategies to reduce use: testing, sanctions and education

Strategies work in three ways: you can detect offenders, punish them, or prevent the decision in the first place.

Detection. Testing takes place in competition, where the performer expects it, and out of competition, where they do not. Samples are urine or blood, and selection can be random or targeted at performers who have suspicious profiles or intelligence against them. Performers must give whereabouts information so testers can find them without warning, and a missed test counts against them. Longitudinal monitoring, such as the athlete biological passport, tracks a performer's blood and steroid profile over time so an abnormal change can be flagged even when no single test is positive.

Punishment. Sanctions include disqualification of results, loss of medals and prize money, and periods of ineligibility that can end a career. Some sports extend sanctions to the coaches and support staff who supplied the drugs, which attacks the supply rather than only the user. Every governing body enforces this through the World Anti-Doping Code, and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sets that code and publishes the list of prohibited substances and methods.

Prevention. Education teaches performers the rules and the health risks, and works best in schools and academies before the performer is under pressure. Welfare support — proper funding, medical and psychological support, and a culture in which a performer can ask for a therapeutic use exemption for a genuine medical condition rather than hiding the treatment — reduces the incentive to dope. Coaches and governing bodies also set the expectation, and promoting clean performers gives the next generation a different example.

Background: the classes of prohibited substances

The 8386 syllabus lists the reasons performers use prohibited PEDs, the consequences and the strategies to reduce use; it does not name individual drugs. This block is background so that any substance you mention is described accurately, and so that the reason you link it to is the right one.

Prohibited substances are grouped by what they are used to achieve. Match the class to the reason from the first block, and your example will be accurate.