To dope or not to dope: Why would athletes take a banned substance?

🚨 Much to do in the CrossFit® world on top athletes getting caught taking banned substances (again…).

To provide you some background, we dug into the literature to provide you some reasons on WHY an athlete would take a PED.

3 main reasons:

1. ☑️ He or she has a TUE. “Athletes may have illnesses or conditions that require them to take particular medications.” (World Anti-doping Agency, WADA). It speaks for itself that we finding ourselves in the ‘grey zone’ of doping as history has showed us that many TUE’s have been used for performance enhancement, rather than treating a medical condition. Fi the use of corticosteroids for treatment of ‘saddle pain’ in elite cyclists.

2. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️ Because the athlete did not know he/she was taking a banned substance. The story about contaminated supplements. In fact, this may be a major problem; a landmark study found that 14.8% of all the investigated nutritional supps were tainted with anabolic androgenic steroids. TIP: check http://www.informed-sport.com to decrease your chances for taking a tainted supplement.

3. 😈 Because the athlete deliberately wanted to cheat. A recent study gave some rationales for this. Next to the obvious ‘performance enhancing’ and ‘financial reasons’, athletes also mentioned the ‘ineffectiveness of anti-doping programs’ as a reason why they took PEDs.

👉 Indeed, we tend to agree. CrossFit® (sport in general) needs more outside comp. controls and long term-up follow up of blood values (blood and hormonal passport). This the only way to gain credibility by the general public and by fellow clean competitors. Or you test correctly, or you do not test at all.

Question is who is going to pay that? How professional does CrossFit® want to become as a sport? How it is right now, doping in CrossFit® seems like an uphill battle.

#sport #doping #ped #crossfit #garard #tue #reason #supplement #science #biology