Stronger. Faster. Longer. And Higher.

Introduction

Bonnie Berkowitz is a successful reporter for the Washington Post who has been writing for their news source since 2010. She has a tendency to write well renowned involving sports, athletes and health. Tim Meko is a graphics reporter for the Washington Post who has been apart of their team for a few years and who assisted Berkowitz in this particular article. The two cowrote a very successful piece that takes a close look at the specifics of doping cases in the Olympic games.

Summary

When drug testing first arrived at the Olympic games in 1968, the tests were nothing like how they are today. In that year, they were only able to catch one man who was caught for having drank 2 beers before competing in his pentathlon.

According to the World Anti- Doping Agency (WADA), today, drug testers catch about 2 people for every 100 tests the perform on athletes each year.

However, in a further study conducted by British researchers, athletes were told that their identity would remain anonymous if they were to participate in their study. In this experiment, between one- half and one- third of all participants used banned drugs to compete.

More athletes have been caught using banned drugs in the past decade than in all previous years, but even still, it is likely that only a small fraction of cheaters are actually being caught.

Contrary to what some may believe, not every athlete is drug tested at the Olympic games.

So, who gets caught?

Some are individuals who just used drugs and were willing to take the risk of being randomly tested. Usually, only winners and random others are selected for testing. Others are apart of teams or countries that already have organized doping systems in place.

Some athletes even wind up getting caught without even knowing they used any banned drugs. These are those who take things like cough medicine, and don’t realize until later that a banned ingredient was in that medication.

Men heavily outweigh women in doping violations by 64%. And 60% of all doping violations in the olympics have come from just 3 sports: track and field, weightlifting, and cycling.

Although the United States is not the overall top victim of Olympic athletes who test positive for banned drugs, we are a close 2nd. First, not surprisingly, is Russia.

Russia is not necessarily the “dirtiest” country to compete in the games, they do however have a large amount of athletes who compete considering they are a substantially large country, and thus a larger chance of being drug tested.

There are hundreds of banned drugs that the WADA leys out for olympic athletes, but most can fall into just a handful of specific categories.

These include steroids, stimulants, hormones, calming beta blockers, asthma drugs and more.

An athlete may walk away with a medal in hand, deservingly so. But, there likely are samples of their own body stored with drug testers that would argue otherwise. As drug tests become more advanced, those samples may be retested and if they test positive for any banned drug, their medal will be (rightfully) stripped from their hands.