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Doping Overview

This article is a good jumping off point into the World of Doping. It provides a clear overview of what doping is, why athletes dope, and various ways to combat it. It provides helpful visual graphs breaking down the countries and sports with the most drug use violations.

The article ends with a list of substances with varying levels of prohibition:

Anabolic Agents

Peptide Hormones

Beta-2 Agonists

Hormone Modulators

Masking Agents

Stimulants

Narcotics

Cannabis

Glucocorticoids

Beta-Blockers

As well as banned methods:

Manipulation of Blood

Chemical and Physical Manipulation

Gene and Cell Doping

Although the article does explain the topic fairly well it does fall short in its depth. To thoroughly explain this topic to the class I will need to dig deeper into each of the various topics it briefly mentioned.

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Messi and Doping

This might be more of a fun post, but I found this video very interesting when I came across it in my research. It details Messi's early football career and how despite his talent he struggled due to his short stature. He was later diagnosed with Growth Hormone Deficiency and had to directly inject HGH into his legs nightly for some time. This gave his body the boost needed to grow from a projected 4'7" to 5'7" in adulthood. I thought the video was well animated and edited, but what especially stood out was how Messi's use of Growth Hormones was not ostracized as drug doping, but instead a requirement to allow him to compete at an equal playing field. This shows how drug doping is a more nuanced topic than initially believed where the full morality of it is undetermined.

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this is just a good example of a gymnast who was doping and got banned because of it.

It also just shows that even the top competitors result to doping sometimes because of the intensity of the sport.

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MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's best male gymnast could miss the Olympics after he became the latest to test positive for the banned substance meldonium.

Nikolai Kuksenkov withdrew from the national championships after being informed of the failed doping test on Saturday, a day after winning the individual all-around title.

Kuksenkov, a former European champion, had not taken meldonium since August, Russia team coach Valentina Rodionenko told the Russian Ves Sport agency.
Brennan: How can world let Russians compete in Rio?
"As yet, no one knows how long a period is needed for meldonium to leave the body," she said. "It's a kind of wild, wrong situation, which needs to be sorted out with joint effort."

Kuksenkov competed for Ukraine under the name Mykola Kuksenkov before taking Russian nationality in 2013. He won European championship gold in the team all-around in 2014, and gold in the same event at last year's inaugural European Games.

Kuksenkov's is the first known doping case in gymnastics involving meldonium. More than 20 other Russians across all sports have tested positive for meldonium, which was banned on Jan. 1, with at least 123 cases worldwide.
American skaters lose crucial spot for next year's world championships
Also, Russian Pavel Kulikov, an Olympic hopeful in skeleton, said in a statement he failed a test for meldonium.

Kulikov finished 12th at the world championships in Austria in February.

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Russia's best male gymnast fails drug test

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Top Russian gymnast Nikolai Kuksenkov fails drug test as meldonium found in sample.

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Going off of what I was saying about gymnastics and how its one of the most intense sports, I wanted to actually taking a moment to explain why.

This article is great at explaining the certain common injuries in mens gymnastics and how it might play a factor into why doping happens in the sport.

1. Shoulder Instability

"Male gymnasts put a lot of stress on their upper extremities and shoulders. When performing tumbling skills"

this is something I can relate to as a person who does a lot of floor.

"research has shown that a gymnast can experience up to 16 times their body weight through their arms3. The shoulder joint relies on strong muscles, ligaments, and the labrum to provide stability for the wide range of motion that travels through the shoulder. Weakness in the shoulder muscles can contribute to laxity in the shoulder joint, which can cause pain and a feeling of instability when hanging or weight-bearing on that arm."

gymnast are prone to a lot of injuries. Doping is one of the ways you can recover really fast which is what im going to talk next.

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Top Injuries in Male Gymnasts - Athletico

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Male and female gymnasts compete in similar but different events. Men’s gymnastics events place different demands on the body, especially the upper body,

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This article is great in explain what steroids and other doping methods are.

It highlights how they work and what physical advantages it can give you. As a gymnast, one of the things that It can be beneficial for is endurance.

For example, floor routines are supposed to push you to your physical endurance limit. The way you can improve your endurance is be practicing more routines so it becomes normal and being strategic in your routine.

doping basically bypasses all of that.

one of the things they said in the article is that:

"For endurance, doping compounds generally work to increase the amount of oxygen you can carry in your blood. These range from drugs like erythropoietin, or EPO, that increase the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells that circulate in athletes' bodies, to transfusions, where you physically inject more red blood cells directly into an athlete's veins. This type of doping is more often seen in sports where athletes have to run or cycle long distances with little to no breaks during competition."

In the example of gymnastics, doping can cause you to be able to do harder and more intense skills with no problems.

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Some Olympic Doping Drugs May Have Legitimate Medical Uses

The use of an internationally banned substance can end a pro athlete's career. But this doesn't mean that, when safely administered, all banned compounds lack medical merit.

1:00 PM

Author | Kylie Urban

As the world awaits the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics, doping in athletes remains a hot topic.
SEE ALSO: Why U.S. Doctors Love Opioids and Hate Marijuana for Chronic Pain
Doping, or the use of a compound or procedure that has been banned by the governing body of the sport because it provides an unfair competitive advantage, is governed by the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA sets the guidelines that most international sports associations follow.

Christopher Mendias, Ph.D., A.T.C., assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery and molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Michigan, explains why WADA regulates certain substances, how that's changing and how some of these drugs may help rehabilitate injuries in everyday and elite athletes alike.

What are some of the drugs or medications athletes use to enhance performance?

Mendias: In general, you can break the compounds and techniques athletes use into three categories: drugs that increase athletes' endurance, drugs that make athletes faster and stronger and drugs that help athletes recover after competition.

For endurance, doping compounds generally work to increase the amount of oxygen you can carry in your blood. These range from drugs like erythropoietin, or EPO, that increase the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells that circulate in athletes' bodies, to transfusions, where you physically inject more red blood cells directly into an athlete's veins. This type of doping is more often seen in sports where athletes have to run or cycle long distances with little to no breaks during competition.

When it comes to making athletes stronger, many drugs fall in the category of anabolic agents, working like the hormone testosterone and to trigger the production of new proteins in muscle. These proteins make the "engine" of muscle cells bigger and able to generate more strength. You see this type of doping being used in sports that involve a lot of sprinting, or in collision sports like football or rugby.

The third class of drugs, those for recovery, can accelerate the normal recovery process of athletes' injured cells and help load up fuel stores quicker. Many of the drugs in this class are growth factors and compounds that are similar to hormones in the body that help tissue repair.

These are increasingly being used across all different types of sports. Take swimming or track and field, where athletes must perform in qualifying rounds of events before making it to the finals. The ability to recover quickly can allow athletes to work at a higher level in the qualifying rounds to ensure they make it to the finals, and then perform their best in the finals as well. For collision sports like football or rugby, the faster you repair the injury to damaged muscle cells, the quicker you can compete at a high level again.

For growth hormone, most of the data show that in adults it has minimal to no performance-enhancing effects on healthy muscle, so we don't actually anticipate any 'doping' effects in our current study.

Christopher Mendias, Ph.D., A.T.C.

Elite athletes who use these substances are breaking the rules of their sports. But are there times when these substances can be helpful?

Mendias: While some drugs and substances on WADA's banned list have no legitimate medical use, many do. Drugs that increase red blood cell levels are often used in patients with kidney disease or who are recovering from certain types of cancer. Compounds that make muscle cells larger and stronger have approved use in combating severe muscle-wasting diseases, like what is observed in certain types of myopathies and in men with unusually low levels of androgenic hormones.
SEE ALSO: Addressing the Long-Term Impacts of Concussions in Living Patients
Sometimes these drugs have effects on the body that are different from their normal medical use. Take, for example, beta blockers, which are drugs that are used to treat high blood pressure. Beta blockers can calm jittery nerves and increase the accuracy for sports where precision is important, like golf and archery.

Can you talk more about your research in this area?

Mendias: My lab does research both on the biochemical and genetic side of muscle weakness and in bringing therapies to patients in the clinic who suffer from injuries that have profound muscle atrophy.

The vast majority of patients that we treat in sports medicine, nearly all, actually, are not elite and professional athletes. We are talking about patients who are physically active that sustain an injury while playing recreational sports. Sports medicine clinicians and researchers are increasingly paying attention to the long-term effects of sports injuries. If an injury is severe enough to sideline a patient for a month or so, there's a good chance that there will be long-term consequences of that injury that will extend many years, sometimes decades, into their later life.

In patients with ACL tears, for example, even after surgery and rehab, muscles in their injured leg are often around 30 percent weaker than they were before the injury. Over time, this weakness slowly erodes the cartilage in the knee. My lab is currently investigating the possibility that growth hormone - a banned substance by WADA - could help address this weakness in an FDA-approved clinical trial. We selected growth hormone based on numerous lab and clinical studies that have shown it can help protect muscles after injury, though it has not been previously studied in patients with ACL tears.

This is just one potential medical application of WADA-banned substances. And WADA does offer exemptions for the legitimate medical use of some drugs. Before it can approve the use of the drug, WADA considers the potential performance-enhancing benefits and weighs this against the medical use.

We don't yet know whether growth hormone can help restore strength closer to normal levels in patients with ACL tears, but if our study and others are successful and growth hormone is approved by the FDA for treating this condition, WADA would have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis whether an athlete would be allowed to take growth hormone if they've suffered a major knee injury. For growth hormone, most of the data show that in adults it has minimal to no performance-enhancing effects on healthy muscle, so we don't actually anticipate any "doping" effects in our current study. But other drugs like anabolic agents that do enhance strength in healthy muscle could give athletes a long-term edge in performance enhancement, even after they have recovered from their injury.

Are there other drugs with legitimate medical uses in sick patients, but no medical benefit in healthy athletes?

One of the more recent high-profile antidoping cases involved a newly banned drug, meldonium. This drug, which has been around for decades, is used in some Eastern European countries to treat patients with heart disease where low levels of oxygen getting to the heart causes tissue damage. But for athletes, meldonium seems to promote recovery and oxygen delivery to muscles and enhance endurance performance.

Maria Sharapova, a famous tennis player, received a two-year ban for testing positive for the drug. A recent documentary reported that nearly a fifth of Russian track and field athletes were taking meldonium. It is a hard stretch to justify the use of a heart failure drug in people who have among the best cardiovascular systems of anyone in the world.

How do you think this research will impact professional sports in the future?

Mendias: We are at a very exciting time in the field of sports medicine. There have been numerous advances in our understanding of how biochemical and genetic factors control the function of muscle, bone, cartilage and tendon cells. We can now use our knowledge of these processes to improve the treatment of injuries to these tissues. Unfortunately, some of the technologies that show a lot of promise in regenerative medicine also can be used for doping purposes. WADA continues to develop new technologies and tests to detect doping, but the list of potential doping compounds and technologies seems to outpace our ability to detect this in athletes.

Antidoping policies are in place not only to help ensure equity in competition, but also for the health and safety of athletes. While there have been unscrupulous physicians and scientists involved in many doping scandals in recent times, the vast majority of sports medicine clinicians and researchers are interested in finding ways to help restore injured athletes back to their pre-injury levels and not to engage in therapies that give athletes advantages that go above and beyond what they could achieve through approved training techniques and practices.

More Articles About: Body Work Sport Injuries Bones and Muscles and Joints (Orthopaedics)

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Some Olympic Doping Drugs May Have Legitimate Medical Uses

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Despite certain performance enhancing drugs being banned by the WADA, many have legitimate medical uses. See some of the banned substances and their uses.

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Its also good to see what organizations are doing about this issue.

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The use of doping substances or doping methods to enhance performance is fundamentally wrong and is detrimental to the overall spirit of sport. Drug misuse can be harmful to an athlete's health and to other athletes competing in the sport. It severely damages the integrity, image and value of sport, whether or not the motivation to use drugs is to improve performance. To achieve integrity and fairness in sport, a commitment to a clean field of play is critical. The FIG seeks to maintain the integrity of sport in gymnastics by running a comprehensive anti-doping program that focuses equally on education/prevention and on testing, with consequent sanctioning of those who break the rules.

What is WADA?

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was established in 1999 as an international independent agency composed and funded by the sport movement and governments of the world. Their key activities include scientific research, education, development of anti-doping capacities, and monitoring of the World Anti-Doping Code - the document harmonizing anti-doping policies in all sports and all countries.

WADA was formed in 1999, following a major doping scandal that shook the world of cycling in 1998. In February 1999, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) convened the First World Conference on Doping in Sport, in Lausanne, Switzerland, which brought together all parties involved in the fight against doping. The Conference resulted in the Lausanne Declaration on Doping in Sport - a document that provided for the creation of an independent international anti-doping agency to be operational for the XXVII Olympiad that were to be held in Sydney, Australia in 2000.

WADA was established on 10 November 1999 to protect athletes, promote the values of clean sport, and preserve the spirit of sport internationally. WADA was set up as a foundation under the initiative of the IOC with the support and participation of intergovernmental organizations, governments, public authorities, and other public and private bodies fighting doping in sport. To this day, the Agency is composed and funded by the sport movement and governments of the world.

For more information about WADA, consult the WADA website.

Protection of Privacy and Personal Information

For more information about data protection is available in the Anti-doping Privacy Notice (Protection of Privacy and Personal Information, PPPI), please contact privacy@fig-gymnastics.org