Drug use in sport should stay banned

IT has been an eventful year for the antidoping movement in sport. From ongoing issues in cycling to the lifting of the ban on Russian athletes, it seems that often the use and abuse of drugs has made more headlines than the performances of the athletes in 2018. The resultant discussions have brought the whole issue of cheating in sport back to public focus.

When the drug testing programme first became established in sport in the UK, it was designed in part to educate our young and aspiring athletes about the risks to their health of taking drugs – as a doctor this remains my first priority. The additional message that drug taking was cheating and against the ethics of sport was coupled with a testing programme designed to catch the cheats. The third message, and the most important to the vast majority of our athletes, is to prove to an increasingly sceptical audience that most of our sportsmen and women do not abuse performance enhancing substances and “win clean”. If you ask the athletes themselves they are happy to see an increase in testing to “prove” that the vast majority of those who compete are honest and drug free. Many would go further and would sanction harsher penalties including a life ban for anabolic steroid use.

It seems sometimes that the testing authorities are constantly one step behind the drug cheats with new methods of avoiding detection being developed before new tests to detect the so-called “designer” drugs used today – drugs which mimic naturally occurring substances in the body and are consequently much harder to detect.

Many have questioned if we should continue to bother to try to make sport drug free. Why not let athletes take substances openly, with procedures in place to monitor the adverse effects on their health? Most of us involved in sport, backed by the majority of the public, still feel it severely damages the integrity, image and value of sport. Not all sportsmen and women would have access to “safe” drugs and good medical control.

The UK drug testing programme will be maintained at a level to ensure we do all we can to avoid a positive test. However as long as the bad guys – the pharmacologists who design the difficult-to-detect performance enhancing drugs –remain one step ahead of the good guys, we shouldn’t uncross our fingers just yet. The bottom line is… it is cheating. It sends out the wrong message to the next generation of world champions, especially in a world of rising obesity and does little to encourage our children to participate in organised sport with all its health and social benefits.

■ To contact the Hampden Sports Clinic call 0141 616 6161 or visit www. hampdensportsclinic.com