The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, and fittingly, the supervisory authority is currently facing one of the biggest crises in its history in the fight against global sports fraud. In April they revealed New York Times and the ARD doping editorial team that neither Wada nor China’s authorities had once sanctioned 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a heart drug shortly before the 2021 Summer Games (some later won Olympic medals). WADA justified this, first hesitantly, then fiery, with the thesis that the athletes were victims of mass contamination. An investigator put on the trail by WADA thought this was conclusive, even if the investigation raised more questions than it answered.
This all happened before the next breaking news story.
At least that’s what fuels them New York Times Now reported, there are great doubts that one of the most important bodies in world sport is still doing its job. Wada lawyers sounded the alarm on May 23, a month after the revelations about the Chinese positive tests. They are said to have reported to a small circle of high-ranking Wada employees that internal databases were plagued by major problems. Files from around 2,000 cases are incorrect, damaged or have disappeared completely. As a result, they lost track of 900 (!) test results from athletes who were threatened with a doping sanction. In the worst case, the small Wada crisis team feared, dopers could slip through the net and start at the Summer Games in Paris, which were a few weeks away at the time.
Crisis? There was never a crisis, Wada claims
Wada immediately denied that there had ever been a crisis. We always kept an overview of all cases. And the database thing – “technical difficulties” that in no way affected the Paris Games. Somehow that doesn’t really fit with an internal presentation from the Wada legal department, from which the… Times quoted. Slides talk about an “emergency,” about the impossibility of “doing our job” and “a lot of work that still lies ahead of us” – just a few weeks before the opening ceremony in Paris. A knowledgeable anti-doping official even claims that the data breach was still unresolved when the games began.
There were and are undoubtedly capable people working for Wada. But in this light, the question arises more than ever as to whether the anti-doping system finally needs to be revamped. The list of cases in which athletes or even countries (Russia!) were at best mildly sanctioned is too long, while Uzbek weightlifters and Macedonian mogul skiers felt the iron cold of sports laws. On the other hand, experts have been noticing for years that the system has major imbalances. Wada essentially monitors many national agencies that feed their test results into a Wada database – around 250,000 tests were collected in 2022 – but these tests are often of such questionable quality that they hardly reveal anything. And when a test is positive or not, the decision is sometimes made by tiny circles (as in the controversial Epo analysis) or by some criteria that the Mainz expert Pericles Simon considered “scientific nonsense” years ago.
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Why not channel the money that is currently being spent on mass testing into a system that calculates where dopers are most likely to be found – with the help of undercover investigators, possibly artificial intelligence – and tackle these potential doping nests with tests that are pharmacologically more sophisticated? Some fraud hunters already work in this way, but the majority certainly don’t.
Today, top athletes are expected to be almost constantly available to inspectors and, in case of doubt, be able to explain the origin of every microgram in their body. It would be the least that the same duty of care applies to rule enforcers.