MORE BATTLES are going the way of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). But the war on doping is far from won.
Despite the world’s increased anti-doping efforts, WADA director general Dave Howman admitted that athletes were still slipping through cracks via the more “sophisticated” methods of cheating in sports.
“We’re doing much better than we had been doing but we’re still not good enough to catch that sophisticated cheater,” Howman confessed in a Press conference on Thursday.
“I think what we are encountering now is a very sophisticated doper, who is using sophisticated methods to cheat [and] that person is harder to detect through normal scientific ends.
“The dopy dopers are getting caught more than they were in the past but the sophisticated doper is pretty elusive.
“Everyone remembers Marion Jones; she competed for seven, eight years and never tested positive but cheated the whole period,” the WADA chief added.
Howman was here on a two-day visit to lobby for the Caribbean Regional Anti-Doping Organisation (RADO) to remain in Barbados, having deemed the Wildey-based office one of the best of the 15 in existence.
And it is the work of such RADOs like the one here in the Caribbean that has seen the levelling of the playing field across each sport, leading to the rise of more prominent athletes from this region.
“I see that anti-doping is working through the fact that athletes from smaller countries are able to be on the big stage and excel; therefore the playing field has become level,” reasoned Howman.
“It’s a good example of what the fight against doping has ensured. If you look back 20 years, athletes from this region would find it very difficult to be on the podium.”
The WADA head has even said that his body had looked at some non-traditional means of acquiring evidence against would-be dopers, such as working closely with the police and customs to confiscate suspicious assets.
These methods, coupled with recent initiatives like the biological passport that tracks an athlete’s blood work over a period of time, have givenanti-dopers an edge.
However, Howman believed that the percentage of dopers was higher than the two per cent that the WADA records had documented in recent times.
“We suspect that number is probably in double digits, but right now, the only data we have is based on the results we get in the labs and that’s showing one to two per cent,” said Howman.
“[However], the main reason we want to measure prevalence is to find out what that number could be.
“In terms of the state of the fight, we won many battles but they are still many to be fought.”