In our world, there are truths and lies. Then, there is the ugly truth. It only elicits one kind of human emotion – denial. One such ugly truth that young and old, rich and poor will deny from their gut is doping in sports. If you’re not Jack the dull boy, you have probably idolized at least one sportsman or had OCD with one sport as a kid. However, life can be a real b#$ch, especially if you encounter a situation wherein your idol is not what you thought they were. The infographic we look at here talks about the prevalent drugs that exist in the sports industry and famous athletes that have used them.
Sport’s is an extremely lucrative industry – not just for sportsmen but corporates too. The infographic tells us that doping has been an issue that is central to modern sports since the start of time. Doping has been indulged in to gain an extra advantage over competitors as victory in sports means money, and lots of it. There is just one focus here – the money aspect. The infographic does not debate whether sportspeople really do doping because their desire to win is so damn irrepressible they might do anything to win. That would be the ideological debate. Another discussion could have revolved around the issue of group pressures. Look what Lance Armstrong’s peers had to say about him. Enough said.
The infographic then moves to the core discussion – a cluster image of famous athletes and the drugs they took. The colour coding used is quite mellow and low key. This probably fits well with the essence of the topic – which leans more towards the serious than the entertaining. The textual content is structured like a web around a long needle which is quite interesting. Each element of content around the needle is structured by – Drug Name, Drug Effects, Days in Body and Used In format. However, these titles are quite hard to spot due to the light grey colour. The actual information is nice and bold and makes for easy reading, but it is difficult to actually connect the two aspects due to different colour coding. Also, information about each drug does not have famous athletes attached to it as mentioned.
The last section discusses “Leveling The Playing Field: The Testing Process Explained”. What are the steps that go into testing an athlete for doping? There are four steps that are shown with the help of an image and paragraph. These steps are quite important to know and maybe a heading for each step that summarizes the step might have helped the readers. However, one data point caught my attention. I never knew that close to 6000 samples were tested at the 2012 Olympics. This was a staggering data point, as I always imagined these dope tests were done at random. It actually makes the reader realize how serious the whole issue is. The infographic has highlighted this quite appropriately.
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