Concept of Doping and Its Disadvantages

Sport is meant to be a fair test of natural talent, training and effort. Doping breaks that fairness by using artificial means to gain an advantage — and in doing so it endangers the athlete's health and betrays the spirit of sport. The cost of doping is real: the cyclist Lance Armstrong, for example, won the Tour de France seven times (1999-2005) but was later found to have used prohibited substances and prohibited methods (including EPO and blood transfusions); he was stripped of all his titles and banned for life, his reputation destroyed. This section explai …