Olympic family proposes WADA take over testing (part II)

(Click here for part I)

Coe’s plans to enlarge testing pool is welcome

 It would indeed be a welcome step if the IAAF enlarges its testing pool internationally. Athletes from lower-rung countries like India either do not figure much of the time in the IAAF Registered Testing Pool (RTP) or else have only a token presence, say two or three athletes at a time in the pool.

If the IAAF includes those who make the ‘Olympic grade’ in the RTP that would make more sense. For example, from India only 800m runner Tintu Luka and triple jumper Arpinder Singh were in the RTP from September last year till now. There is no Indian athlete at the moment in the IAAF RTP. There are a dozen athletes who have made the ‘cut’ for Rio so far.

Enlarging that pool would thus be extremely beneficial especially for countries that do have a doping problem but may not be having athletes who are ranked high enough to merit attention from an international anti-doping agency.

But Coe has also talked about “national testing programmes” and “swifter management of results.”

That part, one thought, was under the domain of the NADOs. At least in countries where a NADO is in existence that responsibility is that of NADO. The ‘results management’ is also the responsibility of the NADO since it happens to be the ‘testing authority’. The National Federation can at best try to co-ordinate efforts, by informing the NADO of its calendar, alerting it about an ensuing meet well in time, advising it about the competitions at the junior level that could be brought under doping control, helping NADO in preparing a domestic RTP and organising educational programmes etc.

Eventually, the test distribution plan has to be the responsibility of the NADO.

Hearing process

The hearing process is done by ‘independent’ panels. From country to country, from case to case, the time taken to resolve a doping case differs. In India, for example, the 11 cases involving methylhexaneamine (MHA) use, which started in 2010, took more than four years to come to a conclusion including an appeal stage. One of the cases still went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and it took a few more months to resolve.

This is an extreme example but it is mentioned here to prove the point that a National Federation can do little when this type of delay occurs.

There were two cases of track and field athletes in that batch of 11. The National federation had no role to play. It did not even attend the hearings. WADA could have stepped in and asked for a speedier resolution, failing which it could have dragged the cases straight to CAS. But it did not.

The NADA’s revised rules have provisions for speedier resolution of doping cases. We will have to see how it works in the longer run.

Coming back to Coe’s attempts to install an independent agency and to help National Federations speed up things, one way could be for the IAAF to take over the responsibility of  hearing all cases of ‘international-level’ athletes. This would include those athletes who are in the IAAF Registered Pool and those who compete in ‘international meets’ designated for this purpose in advance by the IAAF.

At the moment the IAAF does not have any mechanism to hear any doping case, international-level or otherwise. All cases have to be handled by the National Federations and in most instances the latter delegate the authority to the NADOs.

What the Code says

The National Federations in fact have no defined role to play in testing and ‘results management’ as per the WADA Code.

The Code says:

“5.2.1 Each National Anti-Doping Organization shall have In-Competition and Out-of-Competition Testing authority over all Athletes who are nationals, residents, license-holders or members of sport organizations of that country or who are present in that National Anti-Doping Organization’s country.

“5.2.2 Each International Federation shall have In-Competition and Out-of-Competition Testing authority over all Athletes who are subject to its rules, including those who participate in International Events or who participate in Events governed by the rules of that International Federation, or who are members or licence-holders of that International Federation or its member National Federations, or their members.”

The major event organisations (for example the IOC) have the authority to do ‘in-competition’ testing. There is no mention of National Federation when it comes to testing authority.

As for the disciplinary process, as an example, this is what the USATF has to tell its athletes:

“USADA handles all aspects of the disciplinary process if a sample tests positive either domestically or internationally. If the positive sample was given in a domestic competition sanctioned by USATF, USADA will notify the athlete of the test result. If the positive sample was given in an IAAF-sanctioned competition, the IAAF will notify USATF, and USATF will notify the athlete and inform USADA, which will handle the remainder of the process.”

It is of course unimaginable that Coe would be hinting at establishing an independent agency for athletics, “moving away from links with WADA’ as this report suggests.

It would further erode the credibility of the IAAF anti-doping system if it were to move away from the monitoring clutches of WADA.

WADA’s task

How can WADA go about the task of becoming a testing agency for all sports if it finally takes up the challenge?

Ideally, WADA would do well to pick only Olympic sports to begin with. And again, it would be wise to concentrate on out-of-competition testing, leaving ‘in-competition’ testing to the International Federations or else do ‘in-competition’ testing only in major events while doing out-of-competition testing at all levels.

After all, in 14 editions of the IAAF World Championships since 1983 and up to 2013, only 52 positive cases were reported from 10,787 samples (0.48 %).

Priority sports disciplines for testing could be worked out in consultation with the IOC. For example, the perennial ‘doping disciplines’, weightlifting, athletics and cycling could be given top priority with swimming, wrestling and boxing to follow.

National-level testing will necessarily have to be done by the NADOs since the numbers are too large for WADA to handle. (In 2014, WADA-accredited laboratories tested a total of 1,86,723 samples in Olympic sport disciplines alone. NADOs tested 1,43,095 out of a total of 2,17,762 samples that excluded non-ADAMS data)

The hearing process will also have to be managed by NADOs where they have the authority and by International Federations where ‘international-level’ athletes are involved. The IAAF can join this ‘community’ by bringing anti-doping rule violation cases involving ‘international-level’ athletes before its panels for resolution, deviating from its current practice of holding no hearings at all.

IOC needs to expand testing period

There are only 10 months left for Rio Olympics. If WADA has to take over  testing and it is going to take too long a time for it to be effective, the IOC may have to put in place a testing regimen that is more robust than in the past. Not in terms of testing during the Olympics, which can of course be entrusted to WADA, but in the run-up to the Olympics.

The IOC normally is in charge of doping control during the “period of the Olympic Games”. And this period usually begins on the date of the opening of the ‘Games village’ and ends with the closing ceremony. This period is considered as ‘in-competition’.

This period should ideally be extended, rather advanced to include at least two months prior to the ‘in-competition’ period for out-of-competition testing by the IOC if not in all sports at least in such vulnerable sports as weightlifting, athletics, cycling etc.

Everyone keeps talking of ‘zero tolerance’ towards doping: everyone knows a large number of athletes are doping, will continue to dope and will do everything possible to avoid detection prior to the Olympic Games.

Costs should then be no consideration for the Thomas Bach-headed IOC to mount a no-holds-barred attack on the cheats in the run-up to Rio. This may yet not deter the ‘hard-core’dopers or the ones who get a regular supply of designer steroids or the ones who micro-dose to such perfection that their EPO use goes undetected. But it could be worth a try when an all-out effort seems be developing towards cleaning up Olympic sports.

WADA has an onerous task before it. Bach and Coe could be expected to fully back it in the coming months. And you need a man like David Howman, the non-nonsense WADA Director-General, to continue to hold onto the vital controls in Montreal.

(concluded)

Olympic family proposes WADA take over testing (Part I)

In the aftermath of the “revelations” made by the Sunday Times-ARD report about several medallists in major track and field championships having had “suspect” blood test values during the period 2001-2011, the Olympic family seems to be veering towards the view that an independent agency has to take over the task of dope testing.

The Festina affair in the 1998 Tour de France, when large cache of banned drugs was recovered, eventually led to the birth of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 1999. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had then taken the initiative in forming an independent agency which would co-ordinate the efforts of the International sports bodies and public authorities and set uniform standards.

A uniform anti-doping Code came into effect on January 1, 2004 and WADA became synonymous with anti-doping efforts all over the world though it remained a monitoring agency that set standards for anti-doping agencies and for dope-test laboratories.

‘WADA has come’!

“WADA-has-come” has been, and still continues to be, the refrain however, in Indian sports when an international testing team comes, chasing dope cheats. This could be true in several other countries, too. But WADA rarely dons the mantle of a testing agency unless it is requested to by another authority.

Till the advent of the 2015 Code, WADA did not have the authority to test ‘in-competition’. Now it has both out-of-competition and in-competition testing authority. On paper, that is. It still does not perform the role of a major testing agency despite this new clause in the new Code.

But that role may well be re-defined if a path-breaking change that has been suggested by the Olympic family at a recent meeting in Lausanne is accepted by WADA. That proposal involves WADA taking over all dope testing in all sports. The details of the proposals have not been given out.

IOC takes the lead again

Like in 1998, the IOC has once again taken the lead, as it could only have been expected to, as its President Thomas Bach chaired the ‘Olympic summit’ in Lausanne and came up with the proposal which WADA’s Foundation Board is expected to discuss at its Colorado Springs meeting on November 17-18.

The logistical and financial implications for an all-sport testing agency would be enormous. But that can be worked out if there is a strong will to pursue the proposal. The question of “independence” would also come up repeatedly as it has now in several sports, cycling and athletics being the most recent examples. But such criticism will have to be faced and tackled. The main question could be "can this be a viable proposition"?

WADA is funded equally by the IOC and the Governments. There always have been suggestions that the IOC being full of officials who are presidents and secretary-generals of International Federations and National Olympic Committees (NOCs), complete ‘independence’ for WADA would remain a utopian concept.

The argument goes that International Federations would not wish to expose their sport as being full of dope cheats since that would eventually affect sponsorship, fan following and television viewership.

One can bring in a similar argument to question the ‘independence’ of  National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs) most of them, if not all, funded by governments and in many cases completely managed and controlled by governments, like the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) in India.

Somewhere along a clash of interest may come in. This is not to suggest that any government would ever think of knowingly supporting doping in sports. But you can't help if a government agency is doubted for not putting in hundred per cent when it comes to chasing the country’s top athletes and Olympic medal prospects when another government agency would be funding and promoting those medal prospects.

The International Federations have come under closer scrutiny and criticism in recent years. Cycling, despite the Festina affair and the resultant upheaval has been a prime example till the Lance Armstrong catastrophe hit it in 2012 and the independent commission revealed deficiencies in the system that are ostensibly being rectified these days.

It is the turn of athletics now following the Sunday Times-ARD reports. The WADA-appointed commission headed by its former chief Richard Pound has been working on the allegations, especially into widespread doping practices in Russian and Kenyan athletics and lack of follow-up action by the IAAF. But the new proposal from the Olympic family has come before the Pound-headed panel has completed its task.

Simultaneously, the newly-elected president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), Sebastian Coe, has also talked about setting up an independent agency in athletics that could be given the responsibility for dope-testing and allied tasks. He had mooted it well before his election though the shape that such an agency would take had not been disclosed.

Whether the number of athletes mentioned in the Sunday-Times-ARD report could have been proceeded against just because of the variations in their blood values is not the point of debate right now. It is about the fact that so many of them _one in three medalists in endurance events between 2001 and 2011_had suspect values and in many cases they were not targeted for further testing in the ensuing period. 

Even if we accept that some of them might have had legitimate reasons to have returned higher values, like altitude training or dehydration for example, those numbers are still large, too large for comfort.

Sebastian Coe’s plans for independent system

Coe spelt out some of his plans at the European Athletics Convention in Lausanne recently, according to a report in Inside the Games.

"I do want a system that is more independent, that relieves the [IAAF] Members' Federations from some of the pressure, some of the resource implications, some of the challenges of a legalistic nature," Coe told an audience, including International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach, at the European Athletics Convention.

"That will actually mean broadening the testing pool internationally and reducing your international commitments, but allowing you to focus on what you do extremely well, which is national testing programmes and educational programmes.

"It will mean a swifter management around our results.

"It will mean a swifter – I hope – period between testing and sanctioning, and I hope it will release some of those precious resources, that I know you find challenging sometimes when you're dealing with those legal challenges,"

(Contd. in part II)