Drug Testing Hits the Electronic Sports League
Sports fans, when it comes to performance enhancing drugs, will tell you one of two things: either that they’re a terrible evil destroying the good name of an honored tradition, or that it’s an overblown story, that it doesn’t matter if everyone is taking them. Now imagine that instead of sports fans, it was gamers, with their notoriously way-too-strong opinions about seemingly mundane things. Based on the news coming out about video game tournaments, these worlds might soon collide. The Electronic Sports League has announced that, starting next month, players in their video game tournaments will be tested for PEDs. These tests will be mandatory.
Testing Implemented After Admitted Drug Use By a Player
The decision to use stronger drug tests was, according to the ESL’s Senior Manager Trevor Schmidt, based on a notable player’s admission of a team taking PEDs during one of their video game tournaments. Cory Friesen, known as Semphis in the team Cloud9, said that he and his teammates had, in fact, taken Adderall during one of ESL’s Counter Strike events.
Skin and Sweat Will Be Tested
The focus of the tests seems to be Adderall and other amphetamines. During ESL’s video game tournaments, the intent is to get skin and sweat samples on site so that they can be tested for illicit substances. With a huge number of players walking around or intently focusing during video game tournaments, sweat shouldn’t be particularly hard to find.
Drug Testing Coming As ESL Gets More Successful
You may not watch esports tournaments, and they may not be on the level of the Big 4 leagues in America, but the popularity and ability to make money from these video game tournaments continues to rise rapidly, and that means pressure for everybody. For the gamers trying to win, that means pressure to find a way to get an edge over their opponents during a long series of gaming. But for the Electronic Sports League, it means pressure to do away with the drugs that can give gamers the edge as they move further towards legitimacy as an organization. Sponsorship is rising in these video game tournaments, as is the prize money. In the mind of the ESL, too many players using PEDs for an edge gives the possibility of a scandal in the future. Best to nip it in the bud before it becomes bigger than Adderall.
want to take clean, organized notes in the field? use moleskine’s voyageur traveller’s notebook.
Video Game Tournaments to Test Players for Performance Enhancing Drugs
No comments:
Post a Comment