Blood Doping: Is it Rational and Ethical? Essay

You’re in the big race and your rival who you’ve been neck and neck with all year long somehow beats you by way more than usual. You ran one of the best races of your life and he somehow beat you and you don’t know how. Winning that race would have gotten a lot of opportunities from big colleges and instead of looking at you they’re looking instead, at your rival. How would you feel if you later learned the reason he was able to beat you was only because he started blood doping? Now imagine this happening at the professional level every day. Blood doping is unethical, unfair, unsafe, and needs to be regulated and removed completely from professional sports and recreational use. â€Å"Blood doping† is comparable to the administration of anabolic steroids and other drugs with the hope of improving athletic performance. Anabolic steroids have been considered unethical and have been banned from use in sports and blood doping, as it should, is banned as well. The athletes are placing themselves at risk for serious complications without medical benefit. Surely there is the idea that they will do anything to win, but is it worth it? Kathleen Sharp, in her article â€Å"A Drug to Quicken the Blood,† shares the negatives to EPO explaining, â€Å"Too many red blood cells can turn your blood to sludge and make the heart work overtime. The drug raised the risks of strokes, blood clots, and heart attacks. Even worse was that EPO could potentially multiply cancer cells† (Sharp). Look more:  satiric essays EPO has so many health risks and these athletes just ignore them because their goals are more focused on winning rather than their long-term health. There are many other athletes out there, who haven’t admitted to it, but are taking EPO without the public’s knowledge and some of the reason might be that they are taking it just to keep up with others. Imagine this scenario: One athlete starts doping and starts excelling above others, then other athletes will need to dope as well to keep pace with him. The fact that there can only be one winner means a lot of these athletes are doping and are not winning anything, which results in risking and damaging their health without having anything to show for it. Besides the health problems that EPO risks, users are making a conscious decision to use an illegal substance to attempt to benefit their performance and gain an edge on the competition. Much like steroids as mentioned before, EPO is not allowed to be used in sports. Using an illegal substance to try to gain an edge over the competition is unethical no matter what position you take on blood doping. If blood doping was allowed in sports, then the discussion would be different, but since it is not, using it is considered cheating which is unethical behavior and is not acceptable in competition of any kind. There’s a code of ethics that athletes are supposed to follow. They sign contracts and get paid millions of dollars to perform in their respective sport and it’s assumed they got to where they are because of their own talents, hard work, and without the aid of illegal performance enhancing drugs. I think it’s fair to make a general assumption that we expect professionals who are supposed to be the best at what they do to be able to do what they do without cheating. One article from â€Å"Men’s Fitness† shows a study done by Dutch researchers that looks at how much affect blood doping really has on â€Å"elite athletes.† Shawn Radcliffe, the author of â€Å"Study: EPO Blood Doping Useless for Elite Athletes,† explains how the study and found that, in spite of popular belief, there’s little evidence to show EPO can improve performance in cyclists, who are considered to be elite athletes. He describes how â€Å"elite athletes† already have such maximal oxygen uptake, that EPO will have little change in the transportation of oxygen and therefore have little effect on performance. So it’s very possible that Lance Armstrong may have lost his career and titles for nothing if he already had the highest VO2max, or maximal oxygen intake, levels he could which means EPO would have been doing nothing for him. If he and other cyclists raced without the use of EPO, it would make the sport fairer, and there would be no question of his integrity and no doubt in everyone’s minds that he is the greatest cyclist in the world. But since we know he used EPO, he lost everything and it all could have been avoided if the drug wasn’t used in the first place. Even if it was, there should have been tests done to prevent those who were blood doping from being able to race. My solution to the problem of blood doping is to have professional doctors hired by the sports federation (not the individual teams’ doctor) go to each team and test each athlete individually for steroid and EPO use. Especially for major events that are world renowned and watched like the Olympics, World Cup, Tour de France, and the Super bowl, all athletes in these events should be blood tested for steroids and EPO use. There should be no excuse not to since these athletes have a responsibility to be honest and clean for the better of the sport and to be fair to all athletes out there, especially to those who don’t use drugs. Make athletes afraid to dope and hopefully the fad will be eradicated soon enough. If sports can ban, test for, and regulate steroid use then I believe they should reasonably and feasibly be able to test athletes for EPO use as well. Now going back to that big race, but this time without any blood doping involved; you run the best race of your life and beat that rival you’ve been neck and neck with all year long. All those big colleges you’ve been looking at are now scouting you and all the opportunities are opening up. With all things fair, it’s those who train harder and better that deserve to win, not those who cheat and use performance enhancing drugs to do it. That’s why blood doping needs to be regulated and removed completely from professional sports and recreational use.