April Henning
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 6 Feb
April Henning’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I know better than this, but it got me thinking about what athletes do in their preparation and how they get interested in these things.
How academic do you want me to be?
Performance enhancing drugs are a category of a broader set of drugs known as human enhancement drugs.
Generally speaking, performance enhancement drugs are those that are taken with the intent to enhance some aspect of human performance, whether physical, cognitive or social, some aspect of the human condition.
Stimulants are very effective, especially in the short term, and many of them can be used quite safely, as those of us who use a lot of caffeine know.
Of course, anything has risks, but stimulants in a lot of cases could be used within reason to get a performance benefit and to have fairly benign side effects.
Yes.
Yes.
There have been a couple of cases where an athlete has died and there has been some evidence that they were using some form of performance enhancement.
And the cause of death has been pinned by often the media on the substances rather than what the medical examiner has said.
I think it could be a mix of the two.
So in two cases, Newt and Mark Jensen and Tommy Simpson, the evidence that it was actually the performance-enhancing drugs that was the cause of death was picked up by the media.
These were cycling deaths, and what was missed is that they were both racing in conditions that were difficult, often without what we would consider contemporary nutrition and hydration.
There are lots of twists and turns.
It wasn't always so straightforward, and that perhaps the initial reasons for pursuing anti-doping are maybe less fit for purpose today than what they were when this all started.
When anti-doping first became something that was being pursued by the IOC, they were worried about stimulants.
The tests that they were able to develop for those were straightforward.
It was after that when substances that people were using became much more complex, much harder to test for directly, but also that could be taken and the benefit gotten months or weeks before the competition.
So when you were testing them in a competition, there wasn't necessarily evidence that they had taken anything.
This made the system much more complex because then there was this perceived need that then we have to test athletes outside of competition.
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