Weidner's Words: WADA they gonna do?

"Icarus," the 2017 Oscar-winning documentary, takes a deep look into the epidemic of doping in cycling and along the way uncovers a deeper scandal surrounding the Russian Olympic team and its doping problems.One thing that the documentary reveals is that if someone wants to dope or utilize some other type of performance-enhancing drug, they will be able to pass the tests. Sports science is ahead of any regulatory institutions, rules and tests. There are always ways to cheat the system.

Time, energy and money are poured into trying to prevent athletes from doping.It is estimated that the sports world and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), founded by Dick Pound, spend an average of $300 million per year on anti-doping efforts.The question has to be asked: Is $300 million too much to spend on an effort that seems to be on the losing end much of the time? The only reason why the Russian doping scandal was revealed can be attributed to a single whistleblower, Grigory Rodchenkov — meaning that nearly the entire Russian Olympic team got by those $300 million in drug tests.

It is true that removing these regulations and tests could set a dangerous precedent, given that doping has been shown to be potentially harmful to one’s health. However, there is an argument to be made that almost anything and everything professional athletes do can be potentially harmful to themselves in the long run, given that no human body is meant to maintain the level of physical abuse that professional sports require.

Additionally, the argument that doping provides an easy way out and encourages athletes not to work as hard is narrow-sighted claim. Most of the athletes caught using these drugs are at the top of their fields and have worked incredibly hard in their lives. The purpose of these drugs is not to provide immediate performance increase, but to allow the athlete to work harder and push through more pain. As former professional cyclist Tyler Hamilton writes in his book The Secret Race, "People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. [Erythropoietin] granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you'd ever imagined, in both training and racing."

Given the immense price tag that anti-doping generates, the organizations imposing the regulations should re-evaluate the way that they currently operate. The testing that they implement now is falling very short and costing a lot of money, so WADA and other similar groups have a responsibility to either change their approach to regulation or stop the regulation altogether.