WADA puts punch into battle against doping

PARIS (AFP) – Born out of the fallout from the Festina cycling scandal, the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) has in the past decade managed to bring harmony into the fight against drugs cheats.
But while the global anti-doping organisation has streamlined rules for athletes regardless of their discipline and nationality it is still struggling to get to grips with the intricacies of the fight against doping.
On Tuesday the Agency will mark its tenth anniversary in Stockholm.
Back in 1999 drug-taking had become so rife in sport that it became obvious that some sort of coordinated programme was needed.
The sight of the entire Festina cycling team being expelled from the Tour de France in July 1998 after the discovery of syringes and drugs in the team masseur’s car highlighted that something needed to be done.
It became blatently obvious that to fight the drugs cheats, it was necessary to put in place an independent agency, to unite sporting and public bodies.
Every international federation and country had their own rules, giving rise to wildly differing handling of individual cases.
At the end of the 1990s, sanctions for a positive test for the same anabolic steroid nandrolone resulted in Brazilian water polo players being suspended for four years, a French judoka for 15 months and a American woman tennis player walking away scot-free.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) brought together governments for a major conference on doping in Lausanne in February 1999. The outcome was the founding of WADA on November 10 that year. In the past decade, the Montreal-based Agency, has set about harmonising the rules, procedures and sanctions. With the World Anti-doping Code, which came into effect in 2004, they have fixed the conditions for clean sport.
Depiste FIFA (football) and the UCI (cycling) initially dragging their heels before rallying round, the Code has become a key legal instrument recogised by more that 60 international federations and 140 countries.
Some measures had been judged too restrictive, such as the controversial “whereabouts” clause that mandates athletes to provide information on their daily agenda three months in advance.
But this is necessary to stamp out doping, insist WADA chiefs.