In a society where sport success gives fame, glory and money, being the best at any price is a great temptation.
Elite sport has been evolving until it now takes the human body to the limit of its possibilities.
The human body can give a lot. A good selection of athletes lets athletes be found who can go further than where we are now without needing to dope themselves. Clearly, doping is a short-cut to try to get there more quickly and illegally.
Doping is using medicines, pharmaceuticals and even drugs with the main objective of increasing sports performance, not for therapeutic or clinical reasons. This means that it creates conflict with medical ethics: medicines are to be used for illnesses, not in other situations and with sports ethics: being able to compete and perform under equal opportunities.
Anti-doping samples are always taken by following very strict protocols that assure that there is a total guarantee that the athlete providing the sample really gives the sample. Then we assure that it is sealed properly and that nobody else can touch it and that it is then transported under suitable conditions to the laboratory and, finally, that the laboratory performs the analysis following protocols that guarantee the results.
Detecting doping products is always a competition between the laboratories that are trying to trace them and the athletes or their advisors who are trying to use products that we cannot detect. Evidently, sophistication is increasingly important, since some of the present-day products, many of them, what they do is imitate products that we already have in our own bodies. Due to this, detecting an abnormally high level is not difficult, but being able to prove that this level comes exclusively from doping, and not from rare production owing to exercise or other variables, is extremely difficult. I would say that detection is truly difficult to be able to guarantee with 100% reliability that what we say is doping really is.