NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF

BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING
EG1413 CRITICAL THINKING AND WRITING
Semester 1: 2004/2005
November 2004
Time Allowed: 2 Hours

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES
1.

This examination paper contains ONE (1) question and comprises EIGHT (8)
printed pages.

2.

Answer THE QUESTION in the ANSWER BOOKLET provided.

3.

Hand in the ANSWER BOOKLET at the end of this examination.

4.

This is a CLOSED BOOK examination.

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In approximately 750 words, write a critique of the article Drugs and the Olympics.
Your critique should:

Summarize the writers argument (in no more than one paragraph);

Evaluate the argument, i.e. assess its strengths and weaknesses;
Make reference to the secondary materials Doping: Banned Substances and The
Dirtiest Games Ever? where appropriate (avoiding plagiarism);
Contain accurate language use.

Drugs and the Olympics

WHERE does the power come from, to see the race to its end? asks Eric Liddell in that
cinematic celebration of the Olympian ideal, Chariots of Fire. The runner's answer?
From within. Eighty years after Liddell won his gold medal, for competitors at the
Olympic games starting next week in Athens that power may come instead from without
in the form of drugs designed to maximise performance.
There was doping in sport even before the days of Liddell; cyclists, boxers, swimmers
and others made use of alcohol, strychnine, cocaine and sundry other substances to ease
the pain and give them an edge. But by 1988, when a Canadian runner, Ben Johnson, was
stripped of his 100m gold at the Seoul Olympics for failing a drugs test, it was clear that
doping had become rifenot just in nasty communist regimes such as East Germany and
China, with their famously manly female athletes, but in western countries too. If doping
may play a lesser role than it might have done this month in Athens, it is only because
allegations about the use of the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone by clients of BALCO, a
dietary supplements firm in California, have deprived the Olympics of some of its
likeliest medallistsas well as highlighting the pervasive use of steroids in some nonOlympic sports such as America's Major League Baseball, now dubbed the new East
Germany.
The evidence of doping has been greeted with almost universal condemnation, at least
from those parts of the media that love a scandal and the chance to bring down a hero,
and from politicians. George Bush has added the war on doping to his broader war on
drugs, using this year's state-of-the-union address to urge sport to get rid of steroids
now and bringing high-profile indictments against sporting dope-peddlers. Those in
charge of sport are rapidly losing any ambivalence they once had, and joining a crusade
against doping led by the redoubtable head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA),
Dick Pound. Driving doping out of sport may prove impossible, howeverespecially as
undetectable gene therapies may soon be on the market. But in any case, is it really so
obvious that doping is wrong?
Though they come in many forms, there are really two main arguments made against
doping. One is that it harms athletesor, if the argument is made by someone willing to

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admit that putting athletes in harm's way is an integral part of many sports (boxing,
rugby, American football and so on), that it harms them unnecessarily. The other is that it
is against the spirit of sport: it is cheating or, at the very least, it destroys the mystical
quality that gives sport its appeal. There is something to both arguments, but neither is
wholly convincing.
For a start, how harmful are the performance-enhancing drugs used by today's athletes, or
likely to be used in the future? Certainly, there have been heavily publicised cases
suggesting that excessive use can sometimes have nasty consequencescyclists suffering
heart attacks, perhaps because of the oxygen-storage boosting but blood-thickening
steroid EPO, or drug-expanded body-builders who are deeply depressedthough these
examples are isolated, and may not be entirely as they appear. Some of the drugs used in
East Germany had severe consequences, including gender-bending, but these were often
given to the athletes with neither their knowledge nor any concern for the consequences
after the gold medal was won. There are grounds to worry about the reportedly
widespread use of steroids by children, who may, among other things, lack the maturity
(physical and mental) to handle them. But the balance of the medical evidencewhich
would be harder to gather in an era of outright prohibitionsuggests that, used
responsibly, today's more popular performance-enhancers mostly have only temporary
side-effects, at worst. (Gene-doping, done properly, may well prove to have no sideeffects at all.) And any such harm pales beside that known to be done by, say, smoking
tobacco and drinking alcoholactivities not unknown among athletes, but not likely to
be banned anytime soon by the sporting authorities.
Suppose that the only consequence of doping is enhanced performance. Would that really
be against the spirit of sport? Cheating is unequivocally against that spirit. Without
agreed rules to play by, and strict sanctions against those who break them, sport would
soon descend into unsatisfying anarchy. But is not part of the spirit of sport the pursuit of
ever greater performance? Athletes do all sorts of things to improve their performance, to
give them an edge, including things with similar physiological effects to steroids: training
at high altitude, or spending long hours in an altitude chamber (as the iconic soccer star
David Beckham did to accelerate the healing of a broken bone before the 2002 World
Cup) do much the same as using EPO. If the rules were changed to allow, say, nonharmful performance-enhancing drugssomething that Juan Antonio Samaranch, then
head of the International Olympic Committee, once caused outrage by advocatingthen
surely (that sort of) doping would no longer be cheating.
So, should the rules be changed in that way? There is, in fact, no right or wrong answer to
this questionjust as there is no right or wrong answer to questions such as what should
be the offside rule in soccer (or the LBW rule in cricket, or the size or composition of a
baseball bat). Indeed, such questions are wholly ill-suited to being answered with a
blanket rule imposed by a single quasi-governmental global body that tends to see
complex issues as black and white, and to demonise those who disagree with itsuch as
WADA. Far better for the question of doping to be addressed just like, say, the offside
rulesport by sport, by the people who run each sport. Who better than they to judge

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how much performance-enhancement their athletes, and the fans who worship them, can
take?
The development of undetectable gene-doping may soon make this entire debate moot.
But if not, sport, with its increasingly shrill, intolerant attitude to doping, will find itself
out of kilter with a society in which the use of performance-enhancing drugsViagra,
Prozac and many more to comeis becoming the norm. We are all drugs cheats now.
The Economist, August 5th, 2004

Doping: Banned Substances

Athletes are banned from taking thousands of chemical substances that experts believe
will give them an unfair advantage.
There are five main categories of drug that are banned:

Anabolic steroids - these help athletes to build muscle, and to recover faster from
training;
Peptide hormones - these are substances that occur naturally in the body, but
which produce similar effects to the anabolic steroids;
Strong analgesic painkillers - such as morphine and other opiates;
Stimulants - drugs like amphetamines and cocaine can raise the heart rate and
may improve performance;
Diuretics - chemicals that help the body to lose fluids, and may, for instance, be
useful in helping boxers to meet their fighting weight.

In addition to the five main categories, there are other types of drugs that are subject to
restrictions on their use.
These include local anaesthetics and drugs used to treat medical conditions such as
cortico-steroids, used to treat asthma, and beta-blockers, used to treat heart conditions.
Dr Gerry McCann, a lecturer in sports medicine at the Centre for Exercise Science and
Medicine at Glasgow University, said the list of banned substances was so comprehensive
that it was highly unlikely that an athlete could take a legal substance, but register a
positive result in a doping test.
However, he said there were two areas that could catch athletes out.
Some cold and cough remedies include banned stimulants such as ephedrin and pseudoephedrin.

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However, athletes are warned about the risks associated with taking such medications
without first checking the ingredients.
Secondly, some herbal remedies contain banned substances. For instance, Olympic
sprinter Linford Christie was cleared of wrongdoing despite failing a drugs test when it
was discovered he had drunk ginseng tea.
The problem with many herbal drinks is that they do not provide an exhaustive list of
contents.
It is also possible that an athlete has a medical condition that has led to abnormally high
levels of naturally occurring peptide hormones.
And - as in the case of middle distance runner Diane Modahl - incorrect storing of a urine
sample may alter its chemical components.
Positive test
Dr McCann said: "If a positive test is found two things are likely to have happened. Either
the athlete has taken a banned substance by mistake in an over-the-counter medicine, or
they have taken a substance which they could only have got hold of illegally.
"If the latter is the case then they have either taken it knowingly, or somebody has given it
to them without their knowledge. However, quite a lot of these substances have to be
taken by injection so it is very unlikely that they will know nothing about it."
Professor Peter Radford, of the sports science department at Brunel University, agreed
that there was no way an athlete could have taken anabolic steroids by mistake, but he
said there was a "grey area" over some of the other banned substances.
He said: "So many of the proprietory medicines for coughs and colds contain stimulants
such as ephedrin that I can see that a young, inexperienced athlete might naively take a
chemical in this way, thinking it was perfectly alright.
"However, I would be surprised if an experienced athlete did that because they know how
vigilant they need to be."
Professor Radford said another possibility was that vitamin supplements might be
contaminated with banned substances.
"A lot of these products are not produced by the major drug houses and nobody can vouch
for the way they are prepared, or for their purity."
Fitness supplements

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There is also much controversy surrounding a new generation of fitness supplements that
are widely used by athletes as a legal alternative to anabolic steroids.
These include creatine, a substance found naturally in the body and in foods such as meat
and fish.
Creatine is sold legally over the counter in synthetic form as an amino acid powder. It
helps build muscle and speeds recovery from training.
A recent national newspaper poll of top athletes found that more than half had admitted
taking the substance.
However, some experts believe creatine could cause long-term damage to health. It has
been linked to kidney damage and shorter term problems such as muscle cramping and
dehydration.
Other amino acid based supplements that can be legally used by athletes include:

Glutamine - claimed to reduce fatigue, build muscle and boost the immune
system;
Trypthophan or 5HT - claimed to boost production of the "fight or flight" hormone
adrenalin;
Protein powders - claimed to improve recovery after training and increase strength
and muscle growth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/in_depth/2000/drugs_in_sport/859465.stm

The Dirtiest Games Ever?

By Bryn Palmer

In between Kostas Kenteris and Adrian Annus, there were steroids, stimulants and
diuretics.
So will Athens be remembered as the most drug-tarnished Olympics in history, or a
watershed Games that took the fight to the cheats head on?
Statistically speaking, Athens was twice as bad as the previous worst Games for doping
offences.
By the time the flame was extinguished in the Olympic Stadium on Sunday, 24 doping

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violations had been uncovered.
That is double the previous highest number of 12 at Los Angeles in 1984.
Prior to these Games, the last track and field gold medallist to be stripped of his gold
medal was Ben Johnson in Seoul in 1988.
Never before had two been taken away at the same Games. In Athens, the count was
three.
Russian shot put champion Irina Korzhanenko tested positive for stanozolol, the crude
steroid Johnson had used 16 years earlier.
Hungarian discus thrower Robert Fazekas and his compatriot, hammer thrower Annus,
both lost theirs for refusing to give urine samples.
Many lesser medals were taken away and lesser-known athletes booted out for dabbling
in all manner of banned substances.
It was not what Greek officials would have wanted, particularly when two of their own
stars - Kenteris and Katerina Thanou - withdrew in suspicious circumstances.
That episode threatened to cast a particularly dark cloud over the entire Games even
before they had begun.
The machinations over the pair's alleged motorcycle crash and hospital stay only added to
the soap opera.
But rather than tainting the 28th Olympiad, it is difficult to argue with IOC president
Jacques Rogge's assessment that these Games have actually been enhanced by the
exposure of more drug cheats.
More than 3,000 tests were carried out, a 25% increase on the number conducted in
Sydney four years ago.
And for the first time, blood tests - previously limited to endurance sports - were
mandatory across the board.
Rogge had warned beforehand these Games - the first since a global anti-doping code
was initiated - would produce more positive tests than ever before, and he was not wrong.
"You have 10,500 athletes in the Olympic village, you do not have 10,500 saints," Rogge
noted. "You will always have cheats."
"What counts is that we act against this evil drug use. Every positive test catches a cheat

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and protects a clean athlete.
"Today everybody knows we mean business. We have got zero tolerance towards drug
cheats."
One Greek newspaper summed up the local media's bemusement at the number of cheats
uncovered with a cartoon.
It depicted a bashful youth with a gold medal round his neck, surrounded by microphones
and cameras, saying: "I am only a volunteer but everyone else has tested positive."
Such depictions could be interpreted as evidence that people are now so cynical about the
legality of what they are watching as to be past the point of caring.
But to Rogge's mind, those same people should be reassured by the exposure of those out
to beat the system.
"We think people want to know what or who is credible at the Olympic Games," he
added.
"We are making major progress against doping because it is becoming more and more
difficult to cheat."
As a former surgeon himself, Rogge might point out that sometimes you have to sacrifice
a limb to save a life.
And rather than sounding the death knell for the Olympics, Athens may have helped
preserve the long-term health of the world's biggest sporting event.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics_2004/3610830.stm

END OF PAPER