Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

This is quite a controversial topic. This is why I chose to post it here, and not elsewhere, where it may cause undesired aggressive response. I have searched, and not found in my first efforts, detailed statistics by country or sport on positive anti-doping results by WADA. However, it is no secret that today, positives are restricted to those who have no access to designer performance enhancing drugs. Such designer drugs are delivered by the pharmaceutical industries directly to target athletes, and this is an arrangement that obviously takes place in economically central countries. Pfiezer, Merck or SmithKline Glaxo Wellcome will not run the risk of testing their baby unpatented material on any institutional context. There must be trust for such enterprises and this won’t happen in Africa, Asia or South America.  

It doesn’t happen here, where I live, in Brazil.  

And it is no secret that elite athletes from all sports are supplied by a large array of technological performance enhancing resources, INCLUDING pharmacological ones. Yes, steroids, why not?  

The witch-hunt promoted by WADA, with out of season testing in smaller sports or those applying for Olympic status, is discriminatory to say the least. They will always catch Oriental European hardly-surviving athletes, struggling to hold on through the greatness of their past. Or Greek, or Latin American. Those, as I said, with no access to “out of the banned list steroids.  

To my understanding, this is a not-so-subtle form of maintaining the political dominance of the economically central countries in sports.  

There are many other complicating issues hooked to the anti-doping strategy. One that particularly concerns me is the fact that it is being increasingly recognized that steroids in particular are highly beneficial to many chronic conditions and even should be standard treatment in certain stages of life. I will be 44 years old in two months. If I follow my family’s genetic profile, in about 6 years I will enter menopause. What then? Will the IOC or the IPF make me choose between my personal well-being (which implicates hormone replacement WITH testosterone) and quality of life and my athletic career? Does this sound remotely fair to anyone with neurons?  

What about the anti-depressant success androgens are showing in different patient populations? If competing athletes, will they have to choose between the stupefying present day psychotropic drugs (yeach:) and continue their athletic career (barely) or achieving true control over their disorder and quitting their sport? Again, does this make any sense?  

I think not.  

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.