Who can forget the indignity surrounding Lance Armstrong, who – exactly one year ago – openly and tearfully confessed on Oprah Winfrey´s TV show that he had doped at the time of all his Tour DE France victories? Amazingly, Armstrong wasn’t the only famous athlete who confessed to having used performance-enhancing substances during the earlier years. In 2013, several athletes admitted to or were found guilty of having taken banned substances: the Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell, the American sprinter Tyson Gay or the German former professional road cycling racer Erik Zabel.

The athletes were given the following scenario: they had to visualize that they were offered a banned performance-enhancing substance with two guarantees: (a) They would not be caught, and (b) they would win.

Motives for doping behavior:

Why do so many athletes deliberately engage – or at least consider the option of engaging – in doping behavior despite the substances’ well-known side effects and the possibility of being banned from their sport altogether if caught? Researchers in the field propose that there are three motive categories for doping behavior:

Physical Purposes:

Athletes might want to lessen the aches and pains that accompany injury, speed up their rehabilitation process, lose or gain weight or – and this might be the most common purpose – they want to boost their endurance, speed or strength capacities and accordingly perform better in their respective sport.

Psychological:

Elite athletes are often afraid of failure or suffer from a lack of self-confidence, causing them to abuse performance-enhancing substances in order to gain a competitive advantage.

Social:

Specifically, athletes might want to win high prize money, be offered attractive contracts, receive or maintain profitable endorsement deals or benefit from other financial gains caused by their world-class performance.

Finally Concluding this article with a quote by Sophocles who stated that “I would prefer even to fail with honor than to win by cheating.” Let´s hope that this quote will serve as a motto for many athletes now and in the future.