Have you heard the one about the athletics coach who gets tipped off by his local airport whenever anti-doping staff land? Or the lab with the glaring loophole of telling young athletes the date they should show up for a drugs test weeks in advance? You hear such gossip on the grapevine all the time and often – as in the above vignettes – they don’t involve the case du jour, Russia.
What went on in Russia was extreme and probably unique: most governments simply cannot afford to run shadow laboratories or the other nefarious activities highlighted in Dick Pound’s report on Monday. But it does not mean that doping on a serious scale is not happening elsewhere.
Richard Ings, the former director of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Agency, offers a stark assessment. “There are too many black spots to name,” he warns. “There are countless regions of the world with threadbare testing programmes. And the majority of signatories to the World Anti-Doping Agency Code have no capability or experience in conducting complex anti-doping investigations.”
Doping is a global problem, which stretches from east to west and reels in rich and poor alike. But different countries face different issues. In Russia and some of its former satellites, there is too much government interference. In others, such as Kenya and Ethiopia, a big issue is unscrupulous doctors offering young athletes banned drugs like EPO in exchange for 10% of their winnings. Elsewhere certain countries or international federations pay lip service to anti-doping, perhaps by training just one person in their entire office to take tests, thus limiting how often athletes can be tested.
Frequently resources are stretched. Renee Anne Shirley, the former head of the Jamaican Anti-Doping Commission (Jadco), says that things are improving in the Caribbean but Jamaica lacks the capacity to do more. “Jadco is like virtually all national anti-doping agencies concentrating on workshops for junior athletes, testing a small group of athletes in a few sports,” says Shirley, who bravely revealed that her country only did one out of competition test before London 2012. “Jadco don’t have investigative capabilities to do much else. This is the state of most anti-doping globally, and, frankly, Jadco is still in the top half globally regarding its operations.”
Other countries can be too slow or too dismissive of a problem until it engulfs them. More than 40 Kenyans have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in the past two years but Evelyn Watt, the Kenyan journalist who broke the story about two of her country’s athletes failing drugs tests at the world championships, says it is only recently that things have improved. “Athletics Kenya is now more vigilant and committed in carrying out doping reports,” she says. “The Wada investigation into Russia sent fears that the country’s runners could face similar sanctions and there is a haste within AK and the ADAK [the Kenyan Anti-Doping Agency] to jumpstart the operations.”
“There has been talk of criminalising doping and also hunting down the doctors, managers or coaches who could be involved in this. Because as it is, no action has been taken against the managers or coaches.”
So what should be done to make the global battle against drugs in sport more successful? Professor Christiane Ayotte, the director of the Wada-approved laboratory in Quebec, says: “The first thing that needs to happen is the investigation into Russia should be extended to other countries. Wada has also asked for its budget to be extended to improve investigations, which is essential too.”
Ayotte will not be drawn on which countries should be investigated but says a good rule of thumb is to look at the Corruption Perception Index and the medal table. If a country is known for being particularly corrupt yet does well then they probably should be examined more closely.
She also does not buy the excuse that poor countries should be slipped a free pass. “Everyone should be at the same level of requirements,” she says. “There’s no minor doping. And we cannot tolerate excuses such as we are a minor country with not enough money. All of them are in the International Olympic Committee and they all receive money from the IOC.”
Another issue is that while Wada has over 30 laboratories around the world, most are under the direction of governments – which creates a potential conflict of interest. Ings’ solution is for samples to be sent to a different country.
But perhaps change should be more fundamental. Certainly Shirley believes so. She calls for the establishment of an independent global agency to do investigations, testing and case management for all international federations. “This should have a mandate to probe and test countries and individuals in conjunction with Interpol to make inroads into catching sophisticated dopers,” she says. In her view, expecting poorly funded national anti-doping agencies and international federations to do this work is “naive”.
Ings agrees, calling for a “root and branch rethink of the global anti-doping system as what is in place is clearly not working.” As he puts it “an independent and centralised model for testing and investigations”, which “would pool the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually into an effective independent anti-doping capability focusing where needed and not where just politically expedient”. And possibly begin to even the fight against the cheats too.
