I know that ‘doping’ is a very loose term, which might answer this, but either way, clearly it goes on, implying that athletes believe they can beat the system. Why can’t it be simpler to just catch them and make it way too risky to try it?
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Doping is a bit of an arms race. People are constantly working on performance enhancing drugs that are effective but hard to detect in the tests that governing bodies run. In return those governing bodies frequently implement new testing methods and some even store old blood to teat when new methods become avaliable.
As for punishment generally the person doping isn’t actually causing harm to anything but the integrity of the sport so betterment punishment is illogical, generally all you can reasonably do is strip prizes.
The thing about the human body is it’s very good at absorbing and breaking down the things that are placed within in. When steroids or other performance enhancing drugs enter the system they are rapidly metabolized or broken down. So when we test for steroids we’re not looking for the steroid chemical per se, we’re looking for the products of their metabolism called “metabolites”. These metabolites may be exactly the same as normal things we find in a human body and all we’re looking for is a slightly elevated level of them. Or the metabolite is such a unique molecule that we don’t know we’re looking for it yet.
It would be a lot simpler if everyone stopped letting Russia police themselves (which is what allows them to misplace/mislabel samples) and if they faced actual consequences when caught passing clean samples through glory holes. How often do we hear of a non-Russian athlete getting caught doping at an international competition?
On one hand, the incentive to cheat and win is very high. So people are constantly coming up with ingenious ways to get away with it. At the same time, anti-doping is hindered by complicated international structures, underfunding, and in the case of some countries, a deliberate blind eye.
But no country wants to expose that its athletes are doping. They may not want their athletes to dope, but they certainly don’t want the bad PR that exposing it brings.
Then there’s the physiological aspect. Human biochemistry is variable, and natural levels of various hormones can vary considerably per person. And within individuals it can vary over time. So its difficult to draw a line in the sand and say that such and such testosterone level means you’re doping. Obviously there are levels that would stick out as impossible for humans to achieve, but sophisticated dopers don’t take that much.
A big problem is micro-doping, the practice of taking relatively low doses of PEDs for a small but still potentially decisive boost. That makes it tremendously difficult to tell if someone is doping.
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