Sports is a culture on its own

''Korrupt ist immer der andere'' (It's always someone else who is corrupt) - Horst-Eberhard Richter, German philosopher

The world of sports is a culture of its own: athletes live completely different lives from other citizens. They dedicate their entire life-style to one goal: winning. They depend for the rest of their lives on the amount of money they can squeeze out of those 10 to 20 years that they are a professional elite athlete. They spend more time with coaches, trainers, doctors, therapists, sponsors and other athletes than with their own family. They rarely go out and meet people. They spend many days abroad, in international environments, together with other athletes at tournaments and games. Athletes live in a world of their own. Scientific research has shown that within that world, they develop a set of morals and values that apply to that environment - but not to our ordinary domestic societies. The average athlete is insanely self-centered, result-oriented, and amoral. This is because every athlete has a moral compass that places value on physical strength and results, and considers everything else a distraction or even an obstacle.

Stuff like ''fair play'', ''honesty'', or that age-old lie ''competing is more important than winning'', has no place in the mind of a professional athlete. Not that they are against it, it just has no meaning to them because it doesn't help them to win.

All studies have shown doping cuts across cultures and across all sports disciplines as well - even chess players have been caught taking medication to enhance their concentration. In one study, about 25% of the musicians in a competition even admitted to taking banned substances to reduce their anxiety. As a rule of thumb (the studies disagree here), you can say that its a safe assumption that 20% of all athletes is doped. Anti-doping authorities manage to catch only between 1 and 2% of all tested athletes for doping. The vast majority of athletes is never tested, or only once or a few times in an entire year. All anti-doping authorities lack the funds for regular testing, and of the tests that they conduct, the majority of the samples is only screened for substances that are easily identified. More complex tests are not always used due to lack of money. And this still assuming the anti-doping authority is actually trying to catch cheats, and isn't having a hidden agenda.

But the ''will to win'' mentality isn't actually the strongest motivation of athletes to consider doping, research has shown. The most powerful motive to consider doping among athletes is injury: elite sports is in fact unhealthy to the human body, and athletes suffer a great amount of injuries. Many athletes resort to pain-killing medication so they can continue to perform, others resorted to banned substances to speed up their comeback after an injury. If you keep in mind that the average elite athlete will have to work very hard to earn a living, an injury could have a major impact on their financial position. Another common motivation for athletes to resort to doping is to reach the top, when they're just performing under the top level and trying to get there. Among top athletes, then, a powerful motivator is to use doping in order to stay on top - especially because of the fear that the hungry dogs behind them are doing in fact everything to beat them, including doping. Especially in cycling this fuelled a doping arms race in the 1990's. Another key motivator cited by athletes to dope, and which says a lot about human nature, is the lacking risk of getting caught. So if athletes think they can get away with it, that's enough reason for some to do it. These types are the persistent cheats, the ones who will always try to break the rules in their favor.

Most athletes have compared doping to taking a ''shortcut''. Everyone knows you're not supposed to do it, but when no one is watching, it's so easy. It's almost a reflex - trying to make a tough life just a little bit easier. People take shortcuts all the time, in all walks of life, and certainly when no one is looking and we assume of each other that everyone else does it too. No country, no culture, no club, and no sports discipline is immune to this element in our human nature, this ancient biological instinct that tells us to take the easiest route and to conserve our energy.

On top of all that, especially in rl, doping is most of all the product of governments. Ever since the rise of totalitarian states like Nazi-Germany (and the 1936 German Olympics), there have been regimes that poured massive funds into medical research to boost their performances on international sports events for pure propaganda. During the Cold War both West- and East-Germany went as far as stealing and kidnapping each other's scientists in order to beat each others' doping program (the fact that nowadays only East-Germany is associated with state-run doping programs is hypocritical in that respect). Not a single Olympic Games edition has gone without massive doping abuse. Even the ones after the Cold War, in the 1990's and 2000's, were still surrounded by the same habits and doctors. The Greek government ran a doping program for the 2004 Athens Olympics, Beijing 2008 was probably no different (given the nature of the Chinese regime), and at the London Olympics of 2012 and the Sochi Olympics of 2014 we can now safely assume the entire Russian delegations were on the sauce. So aside from the individual mentalities of athletes, politics plays a role as well.