In 1988 Canadian Ben Johnson tested positive for steroid use at the Seoul Olympic Games and lost his gold medal. In 1998 team Festina, a prestigious cycling team, was stopped at the France-Belgium border with a truck load of blood doping products. The team was thrown out of the tour de France and several other teams quit in protest.
There are five type types of drugs that athletes use to boost performance; they are stimulants, narcotics, anabolic agents, diuretics, and peptide hormones. Stimulants greatly reduce fatigue and increase awareness. Stimulants may be addictive. A few of the most commonly used stimulants are amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, and ephedrine. Narcotics are mostly used as a pain killer. These drugs increase an athlete's pain threshold but tend to cause more severe damage because the person does not sense that he or she is causing any harm to themselves. Anabolic agents such as steroids are derived from the male hormone testosterone. They are used in sports to gain strength, bulk, and reduce workout recovery time. Diuretics are most commonly used in sports where athletes compete in weight groups. They are used to drain the body excess fluid therefore causing the athlete to lose weight quickly. Peptide hormones are growth hormones that are used to raise the blood levels of endogenous corticosteroids. Peptide hormones and have severe side effects such as diabetes and a fatal neurological condition.
There are several reasons that prohibited performance enhancing drugs are commonly used among professional athletes" Any way you look at it, doping is a major issue in our sport," says Kip Mikler, the editor of the cycling journal Velo News. First, professional teams train or practice so frequently and hard that the athletes rarely get an adequate period to fully recover. Athletes who have this problem tend to lean towards the use of anabolic steroids to increase their rate of recovery and detecting use was difficult.
