The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was established in 1999, following the International Olympic Committee’s World Conference on Doping in Sport. It seeks to “develop, harmonize and coordinate anti-doping rules and policies across all sports and countries”1. WADA develops and monitors their own World Anti-Doping Code, which covers key areas including the prohibited substances list, requirements for therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs), and laboratory and testing standards. Overall, WADA is the body at the helm of the global fight against doping in sport: they set the rules, work with organisations below them, and check that groups are complying with their rules (more on that later).
Beyond WADA, there are a significant number of other anti-doping organisations, all with slightly different goals and focuses in the implementation of the anti-doping process. Below I’ll try to set out the most important ones. First, there are National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs). Examples of these include UK Anti-Doping (UKAD), and these organisations generally receive government funding to support their functions. NADOs test their athletes across different sports, provides anti-doping education, and works with national sporting federations to ensure they are following the WADA Code. Next, there are the anti-doping organisations attached to international federations. In the example of athletics, this body is the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU). The AIU operates separately from the international federation for athletics (World Athletics), and handles both in-competition and out-of-competition drug testing, banning of athletes and appeals. When athletes appeal against a doping decision, the case is decided at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), a court which will no doubt be the subject of a future blog! Whilst athletics has its own anti-doping organisation in the form of the AIU, many sports use the 2018-founded International Testing Agency (ITA) to deal with anti-doping issues.
Organisations like the ITA and the AIU work to complement the testing done by NADOs. For example, athletes who have not been tested by their NADO in a particular season are likely to be testing more regularly by the ITA or similar organisations, plugging the gaps. The ITA also have an Intelligence & Investigations department, helping them to target suspicious behaviour such as athletes they have received tips about or those who have worked with doctors believed to be providing access to banned substances.
To give an example of how the above organisations work in tandem, consider a British 5000m runner. They must follow the anti-doping rules as set out in the WADA Code and could be tested by UKAD or the AIU. If they are found to test positive, they can be banned by either UKAD or the AIU and can appeal their ban to the CAS, where their case will be prosecuted by the anti-doping organisation that banned them. The process would be the same for a British triathlete, except they could be testing by the ITA rather than the AIU, as the ITA handles testing for World Triathlon.
These bodies each have a vested interest in clean sport and catching athlete that dope, working strictly within the rules of the WADA Code. But beyond an ethical belief in the concept of ‘clean sport’, what motivates countries to set-up a NADO that will abide by the WADA Code, and how are these rules enforced?
The WADA Code is legally enforced by a separate agreement, the UNESCO International Convention Against Doping in Sport. This is because many governments cannot be legally bound by a non-governmental document such as the Code, hence the requirement for this UNESCO agreement. The anti-doping Convention was the most successful UNESCO Convention ever in terms of ratification speed, and is now the second most ratified of all UNESCO Conventions with 191 signatures.
The Convention works to enforce the WADA Code by encouraging countries to establish a national platform for exchanging and collecting anti-doping information (e.g. UKAD). For countries to prove compliance with the Convention and thus the Code, they must submit a report every two years to the Conference of Parties (COP) for the Convention. The precise details of this report have changed over time. Up to 2017 it took the form of the ‘Anti-Doping Logic’ (ADLogic) questionnaire, that required countries to answer questions on their anti-doping protocol, testing methods etc. Countries that either failed to respond to the survey or failed to hit the 60% threshold for compliance were considered to be non-compliant countries.
The consequences for non-compliance seem to be relatively minor: countries become ineligible to bid for major events including the Olympics and World Championships. Slightly more significantly, a country’s status of non-compliance “may be used by the organisation [in this case referring to a non-state based testing body, e.g. the International Testing Agency or Athletics Integrity Unit] in developing their Test Distribution Plan to place a greater focus on the testing of athletes from non-compliant States Parties”2. But most incredibly, States Parties that fail to respond to the ADLogic questionnaire become ineligible to receive funding from the Fund for the Elimination of Doping in Sport. Yes, you’ve read that correctly: states that are non-compliant with the anti-doping movement cannot access funding to eliminate doping, surely a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The ADLogic process was replaced in 2017 by WADA’s Compliance Monitoring Program (CMP), built up of a code compliance questionnaire, audits, and continuous monitoring. These three elements work in tandem to try and deliver a more comprehensive and objective view of anti-doping rule compliance, with ADLogic previously criticised for not being results-orientated enough and being extremely subjective3.
The CMP allows WADA to review the work of other anti-doping organisations, helping to ensure that each of these groups is doing the most it can with its funding to prevent doping and to punish those who break the WADA Code. It is far from a perfect system, but it does at least go some way towards creating a level playing field across states and sports.
There is plenty more to be said on the work of WADA, UNESCO, NADOs and the ITA beyond the limited space of this piece. There is the politics of why an international federation may work with the ITA rather than set up its own anti-doping body, the science-policy debate of why some substances and methods are on the prohibited list whilst others are not, and the funding differences between NADOs that mean some test their athletes multiple times per year whereas others have athletes that are only ever scrutinised by their sport’s anti-doping organisation. I’ll look to explore some of these issues in more detail in future blogs, but for now this has been a broad overview of the make-up of the global anti-doping system.
Footnotes:
- WADA. (n.d.). Who We Are. ↩︎
- International Convention Against Doping in Sport (COP8): Operational Guidelines and a Framework of Consequences for non-compliance with the International Convention against Doping in Sport. (2021). ↩︎
- IOS Evaluation Office. (2017). Evaluation of UNESCO’s International Convention against Doping in Sport. ↩︎
Gold Medals & Grey Areas 