Cuba in the World's Tough Battle for Drug-Free Sport.

“Scenario II. You are offered a banned performance-enhancing substance that comes with two guarantees: 1) You will not be caught. 2) You will win every competition you enter for the next five years, and then you will die from the side effects of the substance. Would you take it? More than half the athletes said yes.”[1] These athletes’ willingness to violate their bodies and the spirit of sports—their willingness to die to win—is the human expression of an ever-more powerful drive to promote doping worldwide. In recent scandal-marked history, doping has been incited or tolerated by unscrupulous pharmaceutical manufacturers; drug “gurus” and traffickers; promoters and businessmen with millions riding on their teams and athletes; glory-bound sports authorities, managers, coaches and athletes; and corrupt physicians and trainers. Since the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics—where official tests were first performed at a multi-sport international event—suppliers have pushed to make performance-enhancing drugs more powerful, profitable and invisible, while regulators strive to enact stricter international codes and sanctions, formulate more comprehensive lists of prohibited substances and methods, and develop more precise testing to detect offenders.[2-4] Efforts by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), set up in 1999 by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), have been reinforced by two international covenants: the World Anti-Doping Code passed in 2004 (revisions in effect this year), which was designed to harmonize rules and sanctions internationally and has been signed by some 600 sports organizations, the IOC and the International Special Olympics Committee; and UNESCO’s International Convention against Doping in Sport, now ratified by 109 governments and in effect since 2007.[5] The current international anti-doping infrastructure is supported by 34 WADA-certified anti-doping laboratories throughout the world, as well as national anti-doping programs and agencies in most countries.