WADA calls for good ideas in the fight against doping

The international fight against doping keeps facing new challenges, while there is a lack of good ideas on how to make improvements. As the closing keynote speaker at the international doping conference 'Anti-doping - rational policy or moral panic’, organised by the University of Aarhus, on 18-19th August, WADA Secretary-General, David Howman, warned against spending all resources on criticizing the shortcomings in the fight against doping.“One of the things that challenge me is the lack of thinking – ideas that would have enabled us to get those who are sophisticated dopers. I got plenty criticism. What about an idea about how we can do the stuff better?”At the conference he repeated his earlier warnings that criminal forces are increasingly taking control of the sport. This is not only a challenge for the fight against doping, which also struggles with illegal trading of doping substances and other pharmaceuticals on a growing black market. Sport's entire integrity is being increasingly challenged by match-fixing and other forms of corruption in sport and its organisations.”I think corruption in sport is a little bit bigger than anti-doping (…) We should remember that there are other bigger things we got to deal with in sport," Howman encouraged the conference.Here he listed a number of other specific challenges for doping fight; among others

• Very few athletes are tested for EPO and growth hormone, and the cost of testing and control is increasing.
• Doping laboratories have become more reluctant to declare tests positive, while doping methods become more sophisticated, for example through the use of micro-dosing.
• Doping agencies in some countries are experiencing political pressure if they raise cases against their own high-profile athletes.
• The effect of preventive work is uncertain and in worst case, reaches only the clean athletes.

Police don’t catch all burglars

Before David Howman’s contribution, a critical view on the present anti-doping system was at the centre of most papers and presentations.A recurring question was whether the fight against doping, instead of being rational and balanced, has ended up in a fear-driven 'moral panic', where the media, politicians, sports organisations and anti-doping ‘crusaders’ consistently exaggerates the doping threat and adopt ever more stringent laws and regulations to get rid of this nuisance.There was no consensus backing that claim. But several of the participants pointed to the fact that the fight against doping gets extra nutrition from the general public tendency to regulate single individuals’ behaviour in detail, often fuelled by more or less disguised moral crusades.The presence of marihuana on the doping list, which is causing a significant number of positive tests in some countries, could be an example of such a counterproductive and irrational regulation.When asked directly, member of the International Skiing Federation’s (FIS) medical committee, physician and doping expert Rasmus Damsgaard, had a hard time finding rational arguments for having marijuana on the prohibited list. Seen through the eyes of the sports physician, it is a substance that has no real performance-enhancing effect and its place on the list even cost FIS unnecessary resources, Damsgaard argued mentioning a former doping case from his federation.“It took me more than three weeks to set it all up. I had to deal with the case. I had to go to toxicologists. We had to calculate the half time of the substance in the body. Instead, I could have spent all my time and money on testing growth hormones on skiers,” said Damsgaard.In some discussions during the conference, the underlying question was whether doping control has come to a point where the fight against doping has reached its limits, unless it introduces such extensive detection methods that they in themselves become a problem. Will the fight against doping simply run out of money, or will GPSs be installed on all athletes in order to monitor those 24 hours a day, Verner Møller, Professor at Aarhus University, asked the panel during the final debate.He was to some extent supported by David Howman from WADA, who recognised that the international doping rules are very extensive and complex and that the forthcoming review of the World Anti-Doping Code should preferably result in simplifications.“It can be so complicated that it is too messy. You should make sure that you are doing something a little more non-complicated, easier to understand, easier to administer and therefore less expensive. What will happen is in the lab of the politicians,” Howman said.According to the sociologist Frank Furedi from Britain, who was also speaking in Aarhus, that is not necessarily good news in a time where there is a general tendency to introduce more and more micro regulations rather than loosen up.  “If you think back 25-30 years ago and compare the dimensions of human lives that were regulated then compared to now, you can see a massive change. So many aspects of our lives have become formalised. Regulators always promise to adopt a lighter touch. That never happens. The touch becomes just as heavy as it was before,” said Furedi, who did not express much optimism on behalf of future anti-doping efforts.“I predict that if we meet ten years from now, we will be shocked and surprised by the kinds of idiotic things that will be on the agenda,” he said.John Hoberman, professor at University of Texas and author of several books on sport and doping, offered a more pragmatic view on the future anti-doping work:“There are two possible outcomes to this problem: Either WADA will somehow manage to create a countervailing ethos of self restraint among elite athletes – which strikes me as unlikely – or the relationship between WADA, the athletes, the federations, the governments, its tests and sanctions, will stabilise in the form of the normal homeostasis (balance, ed.) that characterise the relationship between any police force and the population, whose behaviour it regulates. Police don’t catch all the burglars – and life goes on.”

The conference was organised by the International Network of Humanistic Doping Research (INHDR).

Read more about the conference and download abstracts on the conference website: Anti-Doping: Rational Policy or Moral Panic