Guide to Cheating in the Olympics

Guide to Cheating in the Olympics

Introduction

“The Scientific American Guide to Cheating in the Olympics” was writen by Bill Gifford and was published on August 5th, 2016. Gifford is a New York Times best selling author and has written for several renound magazines including Outside, Bloomberg Businessweek, Men’s Health, Scientific American and more. He has successfully written 4 big selling novels- “The Traveler”, “Ledyard”, “Catholic Worker Daze”, and “Spring Chicken”. Gifford’s work has been anthologized in Best American Sportswriting which is a popular yearly anthology of magazine articles on the subject of sports published in the United States.

Summary

Being published before the 2016 summer Olympics in Rio, Gifford highlights the fact that the Russian track and field and weightlifting teams will not be competing in the games due to the fact that these athletes were at the center of a state- sponsored doping program that investigators found out was a vast and intricate system of cheating, centered on a lab in Moscow. There, positive drug tests were covered up by lab workers by swapping out clean blood and urine for the ones that were inflicted with banned performance- enhancing drugs. Gifford argues that drug testing has become significantly more intense over the years because today, in order to compete, athletes must notify officials every single day of the year, so they can be located for on-the-spot testing by the World Anti-Doping Agency. However, Gifford acknowledges that there are still many athletes who get away with using banned drugs in the Olympic Games. He argues that they are able to get away because “the dopers remain about five to 10 years ahead of the testers”. What he means by this is that users are able to understand the effects of the drugs first handedly and are able to take advantage of the exact time it takes for a drug to be detectable after ingestion- something drug testers seem to be a step behind on. But again, as time goes on, tests and testers only become more and more efficient. Gifford lists and describes many of the different types of banned drugs that are commonly used by athletes in the Olympics. He explains what each drug is, what their results are, how they can be detected, and how they have evolved over time. These drugs include anabolic steroids, stimulants, growth hormones and more. In almost every drug, the results include an increase in power and a decrease in fatigue. Gifford also provides specific examples of athletes using particular drugs. For example, Lance Armstrong relied on erythropoietin (EPO) and blood transfusions to win the Tour de France seven times. Last, he goes over the evolution of different drugs including the fact that caffeine had been on the list of banned drugs up until the year 2003.