What is blood doping?

Question

BEIJING (AP) -- It took more than a year to punish anyone in the doping scandal that shook the Turin Winter Olympics. When the verdicts came down Wednesday, the penalties were unprecedented.

Six Austrian cross country skiers and biathletes received lifetime bans from the Olympics for involvement in an organized blood-doping scheme -- the harshest sanctions given to athletes by the International Olympic Committee

Answer 1

That means using drugs to increase your red blood cell count, it increases your endurance by allowing your body to deliver more oxygen to your muscles.

Answer 2

It's a process used to improve the performance of athletes. A quantity of blood of removed from the body and stored in a fridge. The body the regenerated this missing blood over a few or a few days. The stored blood is then reinfused back into the athletes body...and more blood = more oxygen = better performance.

Answer 3

Blood doping is the practice of illicitly boosting the number of red blood cells (RBCs) in the circulation in order to enhance athletic performance. Because they carry oxygen from the lungs to the muscles, more RBCs in the blood can improve an athlete’s aerobic capacity and stamina.
Methods
The term blood doping originally meant literally doping with blood, i.e. the transfusion of RBCs. RBCs are uniquely suited to this process because they can be concentrated, frozen and later thawed with little loss of viability or activity. There are two possible types of transfusion: homologous and autologous. In a homologous transfusion, RBCs from a compatible donor are harvested, concentrated and then transfused into the athlete’s circulation prior to endurance competitions. In an autologous transfusion, the athlete's own RBCs are harvested well in advance of competition and then re-introduced before a critical event. For some time after the harvesting the athlete may be anemic.

Both types of transfusion can be dangerous because of the risk of infection and the potential toxicity of improperly stored blood. Homologous transfusions present the additional risks of communication of infectious diseases and the possibility of a transfusion reaction. From a logistical standpoint, either type of transfusion requires the athlete to surreptitiously transport frozen RBCs, thaw and re-infuse them in a non-clinical setting and then dispose of the medical paraphernalia.

In the late 1980s an advance in medicine led to an entirely new form of blood doping involving the hormone erythropoietin (EPO). EPO is a naturally-occurring growth factor that stimulates the formation of RBCs. Recombinant DNA technology made it possible to produce EPO economically on a large scale and it was approved in US and Europe as a pharmaceutical product for the treatment of anemia resulting from renal failure or cancer chemotherapy. Easily injected under the skin, pharmaceutical EPO can boost hematocrit for six weeks or longer. The use of EPO is now believed by many to be widespread in endurance sports.

EPO is also not free of health hazards: excessive use of the hormone can cause polycythemia, a condition where the level of RBCs in the blood is abnormally high. This causes the blood to be more viscous than normal, a condition that strains the heart. Some elite athletes who died of heart failure—usually during sleep, when heart rate is naturally low—were found to have unnaturally high RBC concentrations in their blood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping

Answer 4

Taking steroids.

It's a fancy british colloquailism.

Answer 5

i think it is a sport that involves water