Would you take a banned substance knowing you’d get away with it?

If you were given a banned performance enhancing drug that would guarantee you an Olympic gold medal and you could walk away without it ever being detected then would you take it?

“No I wouldn’t, definitely not,” says Irish 1,500m runner Ciara Mageean, speaking on her own behalf most certainly although not perhaps for the wider and less scrupulous sporting world that we live in.

Mageean – present at the launch of the 2016 Irish Anti-Doping Review – made another interesting observation when asked why athletes may be tempted to dope to begin with: “What we do is insane,” she said. “Most people think we’re the healthiest people around but we’re not.

“We’re always a bit crocked, a bit hurt. Something else I’ve talked to my coach Jerry Kiernan about is that if someone told me I’d win an Olympic gold medal, but I wouldn’t be able to walk again after the age of 60, then it that case I would say yes, no doubt about it.”

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Interesting observations

There were plenty of equally interesting observations in the new Sport Ireland survey on doping, which took the views of 148 high performance athletes, from 14 sports at national or international level: Almost nine in 10 athletes had received information on banned substances; nearly seven in 10 were confident in their knowledge of banned substances; and athletes from Individual sports were more likely to have received information than team sports.

Over 90 per cent of participants felt that drug taking was cheating and that deliberately using banned substances to improve performance was “morally wrong under any circumstances”; the athletes surveyed also felt that doping was significantly more prevalent globally (mean prevalence 18 per cent) than within Ireland (10 per cent).