© 2004 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine
EDITORIAL
Warm up
Pursuing the dream
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
It has long been known that sporting performance can be significantly enhanced by boosting the blood’s oxygen carrying capacity through the use of blood doping practices. This method was banned after the 1984 LA Olympics where there was considerable speculation that the silver medal winning US men’s pursuit cycling team used such a method to improve their performance. Previous to this, there were numerous stories of elite athletes purportedly drinking reindeer blood or the like, to achieve their extraordinary performances.
Of course transfusing blood into your veins carries significant risks such as immune reactions as well as viral infections. Not surprisingly when synthetic erythropoietin (EPO) became available in the 1980s the smarter athletes used this method in preference to blood doping. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the first sanctioned test to detect EPO became available. As a result, the rather old fashioned blood doping method has been making
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