Skin-contact doping: An athlete's nightmare

From handshakes to contact sports ― athletes touch all the time. But even such brief physical contact may be enough to get you a positive doping test.

From handshakes to contact sports ― athletes touch all the time. But even such brief physical contact may be enough to get you a positive doping test.

You may not have believed it would happen, but against all COVID (and other) odds, the Olympic Games in Tokyo are in full swing.

Sure, the stadiums are mostly empty, and living in the Olympic Village will feel different with all those corona restrictions.

But the central Olympic tenet remains the same: It's a competition between the world's best athletes.

And with that come those age-old doping concerns.

To try to make sure the Games are fair, the International Testing Agency (ITA), overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), says it is "leading the most extensive anti-doping program for Tokyo 2020 that has ever been implemented for an edition of the Olympic Games."

In their humble words, they want to make sure that athletes using performance-enhancing substances don't stand a chance.

As DW Sports has reported, an ITA team of 24 managers and 250 doping control officers is expected to test around 5,000 urine and blood samples from over 11,000 Olympians over the course of the Games. The ITA describes the tests as "targeted and unannounced."

A positive doping test can result in an athlete being banned from their sport for years. And they have to hand back any medals they won in competition, when or wherever they tested positive for banned substances.

That may or may not be a fair way to treat cheats. But what if they never intentionally used doping agents?

Doping via handshake?

An investigation by doping reporters at ARD, a German public broadcaster, has revealed that certain doping agents can be transferred by skin-on-skin contact.