Winning at Any Cost: Doping in Olympic Sports

Open a newspaper or turn on the TV and you will find a story on drug use in sports. In their consuming ambition to win, too many athletes use a complex array of substances to enhance their performance--a practice that has come to be known internationally as doping. The CASA National Commission on Sports and Substance Abuse has found that in Olympic competition, the high financial stakes for athletes and their families, corporate sponsors, broadcast and cable industries and organizations that manage and govern sports put a big thumb on the side of the scale that encourages doping. Coaches, trainers, team mates and even parents share a win at any cost mentality that often encourages athletes to dope.

Along with big bucks involved, the explosion in performance-enhancing substances and lack of any effective and independent mechanism to police the use of banned substances in training as well as competition, threatens the integrity of Olympic Games.

While doping may help break records, hype games and sell products, it has a dark physical and moral underbelly. Unlike better gear, better nutrition or better training, ingesting and injecting performance-enhancing substances

jeopardizes the health of athletes. Because athletes are second in importance only to parents as role models for children, doping by sports heroes also threatens the health of our children who follow the example set by elite athletes.

This report sets out the compelling evidence of their adverse health consequences. Doping perverts the meaning and core values of sport, undermines the legitimacy of competition and sends messages to our children that winning

at any cost is the highest value. The practice of doping mocks the Olympic Creed: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle." To better understand substance abuse in sports, the environment that promotes such abuse and the effects such abuse has on children, CASA created The CASA National Commission on Sports and Substance Abuse. This 15 member Commission chaired by University of Notre Dame President Reverend Edward A. (Monk) Malloy and composed of a distinguished group of citizen members, has been conducting the first extensive national analysis of the relationship between substance abuse and sports at the high school, college, professional and Olympic levels.

This initial CASA Commission report is the result of two years of intensive research. Its focus is on Olympic competition, primarily from the U.S. perspective. Subsequent Commission reports will examine substance abuse and American sports at the professional, collegiate and high school levels, explore methods of doping prevention and survey the attitudes and opinions of U.S. Olympic athletes. The CASA Commission found that estimates of athletes' use of performance-enhancing drugs in Olympic sports vary widely--from less than three percent to more than 90 percent-- depending on whether one asks organizations responsible for the sport, athletes, coaches or trainers. What most parties involved in Olympic Sports do agree is that doping is a serious problem for the Olympics and must be eliminated to preserve the integrity of the competition.

Since many of the drugs used do enhance performance, governing bodies in Olympic sport face a conflict of interest between two of their primary goals:

• Promoting sport, with its premium on breaking records to attract and hold sponsors and capture a world audience essential to financial growth; vs.
• Preserving the integrity of athletic competition by policing and sanctioning those who use banned performanceenhancing substances.