Physical exercise and exertion impose an increased demand of nutrients and oxygen on the body. To achieve this, some sports persons resort to pills and injections as shortcuts to success. The use of drugs in sports goes back centuries, about all the way back to the very invention of the concept of sports. In sports, doping is the administrations of or used by a competing athlete of any substance foreign to the body or any physiological substance taken in abnormal quantity or taken by an abnormal route of entry into the body with the sole purpose of increasing in as artificial and unfair manner his/her performance in competition. The first recorded during death in 1886 when cyclist Linton Redrenn overdosed on tri-methyl during a race. Many sports organization have banned the use of performance-enhancing drugs and have very strict rules and penalties for people who are caught using them. In November 1999, the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) was founded as an independent foundation with equal representatives from the Olympic Movement and Public authorities. The creation of WADA is one of the most recent and impressive examples of collaboration in international sport. “Think positive - test negative” is the message of WADA to every athlete in all sports. Gene doping, blood doping, and human growth hormone are the future challenges in the field of doping. WADA is developing the tools to detect gene doping and other doping methods of the future. With “sports medicine” coming up as an emerging field it needs to be encouraged in medical schools. Research needs to be undertaken on potential doping agents and improvement of detec- tion techniques. Information and education should be provided to athletes as well as to the society.
Keywords: Blood doping, Doping, Gene doping, Human growth hormone, World Anti-doping Agency
