I mean, you’ll find people using PEDs in any sport, despite the risk of bans and everything. Steroid use is also rampant among bodybuilders.
There is an “obvious market”, but why do such sport leagues or federations that openly allow those drugs exist?
I can imagine that such a thing existing would create an immediate and widespread health problem with lots of people, athletes or not, using those performance enhancers and accidentally fucking themselves. But what else could be a problem?
One reason could be that most of the audience doesn’t want to watch them if it feels like what they’re doing is artificial or inauthentic.
Might be a terrible analogy, but since people cheat on video games, why don’t they have an esports league where aimbots, wallhacks, speedhacks, etc are all allowed? It might be a novelty for 2 minutes, but most people wouldn’t want to watch that. It isn’t how the games were meant to be played. It’s not that it’s cheating anymore if the rules allow it. It’s that it isn’t a good showcase for talent because it becomes about who bought the best cheats.
This analogy doesn’t work for me. First of all, I’d absolutely watch coked esports. Secondly, glitched speedruns are absolutely a popular form of competitive cheating. Nobody would watch an aimbot competition because that specifically would be boring, it’d just be cameras jumping around and death screens. There’s no real competition happening. Wallhacks might be fun to watch - my favorite FPS Blacklight Retribution had that as a mechanic and it was great.
