Athletes should be allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs
Athletes should be allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs
“We cannot all succeed and compete when half of us are held back” Malala Yousafzai
Good afternoon, I am Sanjana Karthik and will be speaking for the motion.
The reason for banning the use of performance-enhancing drugs by the US essentially roots from maintaining the spirit of competition and sports.. I will be deconstructing this and proving how this is a paradox seeing the current scenario.
My first construct seeks to see the motion from the point of fairness. The objective of having a competition is to have that level playing field, where not everyone starts from the same baseline but has fair chances of playing in that competition. Now, when you see that two players have similar potentials, but one resorts to using performance-enhancing drugs, there is no competition because that level playing field is being negated and the entire point of the competition is nullified.
When you bring in the concept of the accessibility of having performance-enhancing drugs, and if it is available to each one of those athletes, they can choose to use one if they feel the need to, and each one of them would again be on an equal scale, because the question is not about the use of drugs, but the point of having an actual competition with equal resources. The question may be that instead heighten the regulation and not let anyone take in those drugs, but isn't that the current scenario too? It hardly raises an eyebrow now when some famous athlete fails a dope test. Seeing athletes like Maria Sharapova and Lance Armstrong only confess after their wins, we can see all hope is useless at this point.
Streaming from this is my next constructive- let's talk about the disparity. The Olympics are a particularly fruitful microcosm for connecting inequality, institutions, and outcomes. Innate talents required to compete in the Olympics are unrelated to wealth but the costs of talent development are subjectively greatest for the poor. Adding to this, The wealthy nations participating have naturally more access to resources such as PED, while the comparatively poor nations strive to get themselves the required gear and teaching for sports. Pitting Australia against Pakistan, or comparing the resources an Australian athlete receives, to a Somalian- we see that the global accessibility to drugs actually propagates a more equal and better competition.
My third constructive will examine the term competition. When we talk about competition in sports, especially on an international level, we strive to get players on the field that are equally as competitive as the other opponents, and each should have scope to win. The terms and rules put in place for these championships were decided by none other than privileged western powers that established rules that were intrinsically benefitting for the developed nations that actually had the power to obtain resources the underdeveloped or developing countries couldn't access. Here I would like to quote the example of Russia- a country that has constantly been under the radar of sporting competitions for abusing PED for sports- but since 2014 this has constantly been covered up, and has only been brought to light about 4 years ago, as Russia had been rich enough to cover it up, until the law finally caught up.
Even when sportspersons from developed countries fail the drug tests, there's usually a fine- something incomparable to the hefty amount they’re paid by their governments.
Instead of banning these drugs in the name of the “spirit of sports” which evidently is rendered obsolete, we might as well make it accessible to all, rather than a few privileged athletes that continue to increase the disparity between the developed and underdeveloped nations..
As the access to PED increases only in these developed countries and incentives to sportsmanship decrease, we constantly see the concept of competition diminish in the global world, while the underdeveloped countries strive to help their athletes make a meager living. and This “spirit of competition” is hence a paradox in a world of banned and under-regulated performance-enhancing drugs. The best we can do is to give everyone the same accessibility. Thank you.
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