The Rio Olympic Games are just around the corner. This means that NBC will begin airing those “heartwarming” athlete profiles. But behind those inspiring stories lurks a long, dark history of athletes using illicit performance-enhancing drugs at the Olympics. Most recently, Russia has been accused of state-sanctioned doping, and some of their track and field athletes have been banned from competing in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Doping in sports is huge. A leaked survey revealed that 29 percent of athletes in 2011 world championships said they had doped. The practice is part of a long tradition of cheating in professional sports: in the 1904 Olympics, one man attempted to jump ahead by getting a lift 11 miles in a car. Unfortunately, there many not be much of an appetite to actually crack down on doping in sports. Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), said that there’s little incentive to crack down.
“You can do hundreds of thousands of tests and not test anything,” Pound said. “People don’t want it to work.”
Despite the risks, athletes are willing to take the drugs in the hopes of getting a split-second advantage that can be the difference between winning or losing. Winning by any means really matters to the Olympic machine, vulnerable to influence and abuse. Russia has apologized but they are far from the only offenders. Kenya, Jamaica and China are under scrutiny, and U.S. athletes have faced charges of doping, too, which puts a damper on the competition for the many athletes who are there to completely cleanly.
Enter anti-doping chaperones, who have the job of making the sure the athletes don’t cheat their drug tests. Things can get even more awkward when they must maintain unobstructed views while collecting urine samples. Despite the rigorous testing, athletes are clearly slipping through the cracks for many reasons. For start, there are multiple tests, and none of them can detect the full range of drugs athletes might be on, from anabolic steroids to EPO to human growth hormone.
If we truly want to clean up sports, we should empower WADA by making it truly independent, and put pressure on the broader sport system to aggressively combat doping. When you combine all the money incentivizing athletes to get an edge with all the imperfection of tests, you would hope there would be some robust independent monitoring system in place.
