Article about the "Doping Athletes" by T. Pacholczyk

I recently found excellent article about "Doping Athletes" by T. Pacholczyk, The National Catholic Bioethics Center. Here is part of it: "The use of performance-enhancing drugs by professional athletes not only leads to serious challenges in maintaining a level playing field in competitive sports but also raises broader ethical issues and concerns.

Some of these concerns were highlighted in 2015 when the former world number one tennis star Maria Sharapova was banned from competitive play for two years by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) after she tested positive for the banned substance meldonium. The Court of Arbitration for Sport subsequently reduced her sentence to 15 months. Meldonium, an over-the-counter Latvian drug known to dilate blood vessels and increase the flow of blood, may contribute to improving an athlete’s physical endurance. Her case was made more complicated by her claim that she was taking the drug for health reasons, a claim viewed with skepticism among other athletes and ultimately rejected by the Independent Tribunal appointed by the ITF to review the case. Former British Olympic sprinter and world championship bronze medalist Craig Pickering described the real pressure that top athletes can face:

I would bet my life savings that Sharapova was taking this medication because of its purported performance enhancing effects… Athletes are always going to push the boundaries in order to have a chance at success. That is what happens when you introduce competition.

In competitive athletics, the supposition is that competitors are beginning on a par with each other, which means that no one has an “unfair” or “unjust” advantage over another going into the competition. At the starting line, they arrive as equals in the sense that they arrive with whatever they were endowed with at birth, and whatever they may have managed to become through practice, hard work, and discipline."

For more see at https://www.ncbcenter.org/files/9414/9728/1328/MSOB143_Doping_Athletes.pdf