This article was an attempt to reveal the Etruscan sport conception and contest ideology. Author investigates which part of Greek heritage, including sport contest perception and practice, went to Roman civilization without changes or modified. There are some parallels between the Greeks and the Etruscans - as successors of Greek culture – civilizations too. Author refers to sport historians’ analysis of the Etruscan art – mainly vases and toms frescoes. Frescoes of four tombs are analyzed in more detail, interpretations of their paintings are made also. It is reasoned that Greek migration to the Etruscan territories influenced mutation and decline of Greek depiction principles of sport themes on vases and tombs frescoes. It is talked out why among the Etruscans originated need of sport contest. It is stated that the Etruscans after imitating – perhaps without being initially aware of it – the Greeks in many aspects of their life, including sports contests, later acquired greater autonomy revealing features of originality. Research of art, in many cases, helps to defend this thesis but it often brings before “crossroads”. In accordance with semantic value of frescoes images it is difficult to find there the cultural values of Greek contest. The contest that the Etruscans wanted was exclusively aimed at providing entertainment, based on the reproduction of clichés and without any “competitive spirit”. Besides, the Etruscans were known to love dance and entertainment, historians see other features they had passed to the Romans also. But these features are very remote from the individualism of the Greeks and their theory of kalos kagathos. The reputation of the Games of Olympia had spread all over then known world without any consideration for the ideals that had established and consecrated them.

As an element of mass culture, sport plays important social roles, creating an entire range of behavioural models. Sportspeople represent the efficiency of actions, persistence in aiming at their goals, conscientiousness, diligence and physical perfection. They are successful people and their success brings them fame, prestige and money. What are the expectations towards women’s sports? Is it about encouraging competition among an ever-growing number of women who would achieve results comparable to those of men? Or is it about gender competition, aimed at showing that the idea of fight, traditionally reserved for men, may also become women’s domain? The answer to those questions is quite simple – women want to win, too. The aims of women’s sports are exactly the same as those associated with men’s sports: achieving better and better results, crossing barriers, generating the best show possible in order to attract thousands of spectators. Apart from the morpho-functional conditions for women who practice professional sports, the psychosocial context of the phenomenon also seems to be very important. [...]

Physical exercise-induced bronchial asthma is a disease, which is one of the reasons for the removal of athletes from training and sports. At the same time, if treatment is adequate, athletes can attain high results. The algorithm of physical exercise-induced asthma diagnostics should include, in addition to the purely medical standard examination, the testing under conditions of loads modelling and in the course of natural training process for the estimation of variations in the peak rate of expiration. The prophylaxis of bronchoconstriction attacks under physical loads in athletes with this disease must be based on their teaching: keeping a diet, obligatory intense warm-up load, and use of pharmacological drugs, including those with the metabolitotropic, immunomodulative, and energotonic actions. When having physical exercise-induced asthma, the therapeutic approach must obligatorily be considered that a significant part of bronchodilators is referred to the substances forbidden in sport and will be built on this basis. At present, there exist the targeted methodologies of prophylaxis and treatment of this disease in athletes with the use of allowed medicinal agents such as antileucotrienes. They are permitted for the application to young and adult athletes and give a high therapeutic effect with insignificant number of side phenomena.

At present time, the rational search for a protection of cardiovascular system of athletes and the assessment of such protection efficiency are the very important problems in sports pharmacology and sports cardiology. It is worth noting that athletic training pharmacology, aimed at the stimulation of physical workability in the majority of sports events, can become, together with overloads, the principal reason for a deterioration of health and life’s quality as well as for the sudden death of athletes without a proper cardioprotection. The problem of protection is significantly complicated under modern conditions due to the permanent hardening of anti-doping sanctions (e.g., the recent ban on the use of trimetazidine and meldonium) that essentially limit the possibilities for sports cardiologists. Therefore, the most grounded exit, from the current position, is the use of metabolitotropic medications, in particular, those on the basis of L-carnitine (gamma-butyrobetaine). The wide spectrum of physiologic and biochemical influence of this substance on organism gives possibility to moderately affect the physical and mental workability of athletes even under the conditions of long-term intense physical loads. The complex action of pharmacological agents on the basis of L-carnitine on organism allows one to use it on all stages of the preparation with high efficiency of the cardioprotective and ergogenic effects. Despite the bans of WADA, sports cardiologist possesses a sufficient pool of pharmacological agents that can ensure the protection of myocardium under conditions of training process and competition and can preserve athlete’s health as well as his/her physical workability.

Readjustments of functional and structural character contribute to the achievements of higher performances due to the lack of aerobic physical work capacity increase, on the one hand, whereas, on the other hand, they may become the main cause of sudden athletes’ death. Deficiency of macroergic phosphates plays an important role in the deterioration of myocardial state during loads. Therefore, searching for and estimating the mechanisms of pharmacological cardioprotective means influence on physical work capacity that are based on adenosine triphosphate, the major macroerg should rely on the studies of those principal metabolic indices, which are involved in the processes of oxygen transport, such as the expressiveness of oxidative homeostasis changes at membrane level in erythrocytes, pH shifts, and blood oxygen saturation.

In the article, it is revealed that modelling continuous physical loads in rats (treadmill running) has demonstrated a positive impact of ATP-long preparation course application on the changes in the content of one of the transition products of lipid peroxidation, malondialdehyde, and the main nonenzymatic antioxidant, reduced glutathione, as well as venous oxygen saturation and blood pH with simultaneous improvement of electrocardiogram parameters and physical work capacity increase, thus, confirming mediated cardioprotective and ergogenic action of the studied preparation. In particular, the results have demonstrated that, in the main group of animals, subjected to physical loads (treadmill running), in the face of intraperitoneal administration of 0.12 g·kg–1 daily dose of ATP-long, equal to therapeutic dosing of preparation, the basis for endurance parameter increase is the reduction of oxidative stress expression within red-cell membranes with the decrease in prooxidant-antioxidant ratio from 2.23 in control group to 1.22 conv. un. in the main group, pH value normalization in venous blood of animals and increase of its oxygen saturation up to 88.3±1.1%, which approximately corresponds to saturation at the level of 89.8±1.2% in intact animals. [...]

Sportininkams teikiama farmakologinė pagalba gerina jų darbingumą ir organizmo prisitaikymą prie vis didėjančių fizinių ir psichoemocinių krūvių. Olimpinio sporto farmakologijos uždaviniai yra šie:

1. Metabolinės pažaidos korekcija palaikant ir didinant sportininkų fizinį darbingumą.

2. Organizmo adaptacijos prie intensyvios ir ilgalaikės fizinės ir psichologinės įtampos poveikio ir imuninio pasipriešinimo didinimas.

3. Organizmo adaptacijos prie laiko ir klimatinių juostų kaitos didinimas, arba desinchroniškumo profilaktika ir korekcija.

4. Pervargimo ir patologinės būklės, susijusios su fizinių krūvių poveikiu, profilaktika.

Siekiant įgyvendinti tikslus, tenka vartoti daug farmakologinių preparatų, darančių įtaką įvairioms metabolizmo grandims sportininko organizme. Reikia atsižvelgti ir į tai, kad bet kurie farmakologiniai preparatai, kurie yra skirti fiziniam darbingumui didinti ir atsigavimui optimizuoti, yra nepakankami arba visai neefektyvūs esant priešpatologinei organizmo būsenai, arba ligai, arba esant neadekvačiam fizinių krūvių dozavimui. Sportininkams, vartojantiems farmakologinius preparatus, reikia gerai žinoti, kokius metabolizmo procesus jie veikia, kokie jų poveikio mechanizmai ir koks jų poveikis treniruočių proceso efektyvinimui. Taip pat svarbu yra žinoti nepageidautiną šių preparatų vartojimo poveikį, jų poveikio pašalinį efektą.

Išanalizavę literatūros šaltinius ir apibendrinę savo tyrimo duomenis, autoriai suformulavo šiuos pagrindinius principus, į kuriuos reikia atsižvelgti sudarant sportininkų farmakologinio aprūpinimo programą. [...]

Under current conditions with noticeably increased competition between the leading sports countries on the global stage, the greatest success is achieved, as a rule, by representatives of the country, in which the latest achievements of science and technology are best used. The level of modern sport development, those overloads that the athletes experience are so high that any attempts to stop using medicinal preparations reflect the views of not even yesterday, but the day before yesterday. Over the past 15–20 years, the volume and intensity of training and competitive loads have increased by 2–3 times, and representatives of many sports events have almost reached the limit of the human body physiological capacities. That having been said, the nutritional inadequacy of athletes’ diets, the need for recovery and preventive measures, body adaptation to intensive physical and psychoemotional loads as well as frequent climate and time zone changes necessitate the usage of pharmacological preparations contributing to work capacity increase and accelerating the recovery processes after significant loads. Unfortunately, this has led to widespread usage of doping in general and anabolic steroids, in particular.

Anabolic means are the substances the action of which is aimed at intensification of anabolic (synthetic) processes in the body, i.e. substances accelerating formation and regeneration of structural parts of cells, tissues and muscular structures. Non-Olympic sports events representatives and the youth not engaged in professional sport tend to use steroid doping as well. The prevalence of usage of banned substances and methods remains high, reliable high precision methods for the detection of many of them are absent, and athletes, not knowing the pitfalls of taking anabolic agents, continue to use them on a mass scale, which can cause both immediate and remote negative effects on health and quality of life. Therefore, every new attempt to explain potential health and life quality hazards is a step forward in the fight against doping.

This review presents modern classification of anabolic agents, headlines their action mechanism and details side effects of using representatives of all three groups of banned drugs including those recently synthesized. It is emphasized that the use of anabolics may not only lead to deprivation of medals won illegally, but cause immediate and delayed negative influences on the athlete’s body further resulting in deterioration of social adaptation, loss of health and, possibly, life itself.

The article analyses functional status of highly skilled five-a-side football (futsal) players that allows individualizing preparation process and also provides an integrated approach to the solution of players’ sportswear optimization problem.

Variation of volume and intensity of training load is caused by reserve opportunities of respiratory system of athlete’s organism. Indicators of external breath function that provide highly skilled athletes with correct selection of training loads in sports during preparatory as well as competitive periods of year training cycle are generalized in the article.

Genetic diagnostics is the advanced method of athlete’s opportunities assessment. The analysis of genetic markers has allowed objectively to define predisposition of the athlete to particular kind of activity (specialization) that has created favourable conditions for effective formation of team’s line-up in such sport as five-a-side football (futsal).

Methodical recommendations, presented in the publication, allow experts approaching the selection of athletes while taking into account their genetic markers and functionality that are considered as informative characteristics; and, as considered, it influences training and competitive process that provides achievements of high sports results in the chosen sport.