What Is Doping?

What is doping? Doping is where the use of performance enhancing drugs; athletes dope to improve their overall performance. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) suggests that 1 in every 10 athletes dope. Despite the heavy penalties in a variety of highly regarded sporting events, athletes still dope. As an athlete myself, competing in tough sporting conditions anything that can help out perform other competitors is always a temptation.

Authorities want dope to be a nope in sporting events. Although audiences want to see high levels of competition and records to be broken, athletes should be honest and play the game cleanly and fair like the way it was originally made to be played.

Variations of cartoon texts outline and over extend the characteristics of why athletes dope. Most cartoons replace the athlete’s equipment with a sports enhancing drug to outline what they used to get the results they did. Even though the illustrations may come across as humorous, they still alarm audiences that athletes still dope in the modern age of sports. Cartoons put a humorous side to a very big problem is sports.

Tennis superstar Maria Sharapova was recently suspended for the use of a prohibited substance. Does her case show that all tennis players dope? Just like tennis this is a back and forth argument, but though illustrations make audiences believe so.

The cartoon shows Maria Sharapova holding the banned substance, Meldonium. Peter Brooke, the artist of the illustration drew Maria to be holding the banned enhancement drug in the same way she held the Rosewater Dish trophy when she last won at the Wimbledon tennis event. The cartoon was strategically drawn to point out that if it was not for the use of the banned substance, Maria Sharapova may never have won the Wimbledon Trophy. If a highly respected tennis star was caught, the public will assume because of her status many less successful tennis talents are doing the same to reach the highest level, such as being world number #1 like Maria Sharapova.

Sharapova took medication because of it’s purported performance-enhancing effects. The same reason as a number of other athletes, including the 2013 World Champion over 1500m Abeba Aregawi, were taking it, and now have positive tests to their name.

Barry Bonds was an outstanding retired Major League Baseball player who retired in 2007 after oversetting the Hank Aaron all-time home run record of 755 in the same year. It was a triumphant end to a nearly 20-year career. Throughout his career, Barry Bonds received seven Most Valuable Player Awards, and broke two Major League baseball records for homeruns including the all-time home run record and the single season MLB record for homeruns. Barry Bonds is now being accused in the use of steroids due to his late insurgent of power.

The illustration above

...