Use of Performance-enhancing Drugs in Association Football
Unlike individual sports such as bicycling, weight-lifting, and track and field, Football (soccer) is not widely associated with performance enhancing drugs. Like most high-profile team sports, football suffers more from an association with recreational drugs, the case of Diego Maradona and cocaine in 1991 being the best known of those.
Football has however been criticised for not sanctioning players implicated in performance enhancing drug scandals. Most recently, Operation Puerto implicated approximately 50 cyclists and 150 sportspersons of other sporting codes, including several "high profile football players". While the cyclists were named and pursued by the governing bodies of cycling, none of the football players were named or punished for their involvement in the doping ring.
Read more about this topic: Doping In Sport
Famous quotes containing the words drugs, association and/or football:
“To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off.”
—C.E. (Charles Edward)
“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)