Performance Enhancing Drugs May Actually Cause Athletes to Compete More Poorly

It turns out that performance-enhancing drugs may actually cause athletes to perform more poorly. Scientists made comparisons between pre-1932 records and post-1932 records, and found that times, distances and other results did not improve as expected in the doping era.

"The effects of doping in modern sports are far and widespread, encompassing not only the athletes and sporting teams involved, but also sponsors and fans," said Aaron Hermann, lead author of the new study, in a news release. "The average best life records for 'doped' top athletes did not differ significantly from those considered not to have doped. Even assuming that not all cases of doping were discovered during this time, the practice of doping did not improve sporting results as commonly believed."

The researchers examined sporting records of male and female athletes across 26 sports between 1886 and 2012. Comparisons, in particular, were made when steroids became available. The scientists found that doping actually didn't improve results.

"The 2000 Olympics gold medal result for the women's 100m sprint was even poorer than the gold medal obtained in the 1968 Olympics, the first year of doping testing in the Olympics," said Hermann. "This research demonstrates that doping practices are no improving results and in fact, may be harming them-seemingly indicating that 'natural' human abilities would outperform the potentially doping 'enhanced' athletes-and that in some sports, doping may be highly prevalent."

The findings reveal that taking these drugs may actually not enhance performance as expected. While it could produce a minor improvement in one aspect of performance, it may have a detrimental effect in other areas.

"In many sports, there are perceptions that an athlete needs to dope in order to remain competitive and I hope that these findings will confront those ill-informed views, and help stamp out doping in sport," said Hermann.

The findings are published in the Journal of Human Sport and Exercise.

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