Who are you calling a cheat?
Drug testing in New Zealand sport has caught only five deliberate cheats in 10 years. The rest of those banned have no idea they did anything wrong.
Drug Free Sport NZ’s testing regime has netted just five deliberate drug cheats in the past decade.
Those five cases, in which either the Sports Tribunal or NZ Rugby judiciary ruled the athlete had deliberately sought to gain a performance-enhancing advantage, represent 8.5 per cent of all cases heard, a Stuff analysis of every published antidoping decision in that time has found.
In the other 91.5 per cent, the positive test was a result of recreational drug use or what was deemed to be unintentional use of a prohibited substance.
Yet, even in cases where it was accepted the athlete had not intended to cheat, bans were issued 89 per cent of the time.
In all cases, the majority of sportspeople sanctioned were amateurs competing at ‘‘subnational’’ level.
The findings bring into sharp focus a number of issues the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) is grappling with, including its ineffectiveness in stamping out systematic cheating, the growing number of ‘‘dubious’’ convictions, disproportionate sanctions, and a system that runs roughshod over athlete welfare.
The credibility of the antidoping movement has further been challenged this month with Wada’s decision to reinstate the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, despite Russia’s failure to meet two key conditions in the ‘‘roadmap to compliance’’. Critics argue Wada oversees a system that on one hand imposes draconian and unjust penalties on athletes that mistakenly violate a strict set of rules in circumstances where it is clear they are not flagrant cheats, while at the same time has an elastic set of conditions for an organisation that has withheld evidence of a state-sponsored doping programme.
Heath Mills, of the NZ Athletes Federation, says there is blatant evidence the current system is not fit for purpose.
‘‘If its goal is to catch genuine doping cheats – and that is why Wada came about many years ago – then it doesn’t actually do that. Predominantly it catches people who have no idea they’ve done anything wrong and they’re certainly not trying to gain an advantage.
‘‘I’m not sure that the public really understands that. They see the headlines of athletes who are banned for anti-doping violations, and the automatic assumption is that they are cheats, when more often than not it is an inadvertent error that has massive implications.’’ While the issues uncovered in
Stuff’s research mirror much of what is happening around the world, a leading academic and expert in anti-doping policy believes the incidence here of ‘‘inadvertent dopers’’ is high.
Paul Dimeo, an associate professor of sport at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, says the numbers should be cause for alarm. ‘‘The number [of athletes found to have sought a performanceenhancing advantage] is a much lower number than I would have expected.
‘‘In fact, those numbers should almost be flipped around. You would expect it to be the opposite to that if those cases have come about because of positive drug tests.
‘It opens the question as to how that might be explained. Some people might say ‘Well, it’s because people are not taking performance-enhancing drugs’ therefore that’s an accurate pattern. But then, we have seen plenty of examples where the testing system has not been good enough to catch athletes known to have taken performanceenhancing drugs, and in fact the more deliberate and sophisticated they are, the less chance they have of being caught.’’
Drug-Free Sport NZ boss Nick Paterson acknowledges the majority of sportspeople his organisation prosecutes did not intend to cheat. He says he has sympathy for athletes banned for unintentional violations, but believes most could have been avoided had athletes taken their responsibilities seriously.
‘‘We certainly don’t enjoy bringing athletes to the Sports Tribunal. I like to say we’re in the business of educating athletes and that is our primary focus, with the enforcement end of things only a small part of what we do.
‘‘What frustrates me enormously is when we have athletes that could have avoided sanctions if they had just done the rudimentary checks.’’
While DFSNZ’s testing programme is almost exclusively netting inadvertent dopers, the agency has had more success weeding out cheats through investigations.
When you include cases that have been brought about as a result of non-analytical findings – that is, violations that weren’t found through drug testing – the number of deliberate cheats versus unintentional breaches begins to even out.
The breakdown of all antidoping decisions over the past 10 years shows 31 per cent of athletes had sought to gain a performance-enhancing advantage, 32.5 per cent were unintentional violations, while 29 per cent were deemed to be recreational drug use. In 7 per cent of the cases, no violation was found.
On average, DFSNZ will refer about eight cases a year to the relevant judicial body, but those numbers have spiked in the past two years. Paterson says this is due to a shift from being a testing agency to investigative body.
It has an information-sharing agreement with Medsafe NZ and enforcement agencies such as Customs to help catch athletes importing prohibited substances online. It was through this arrangement with Medsafe that up to 80 athletes were identified in the database of a Christchurch man jailed for importing and distributing the steroid clenbuterol online.
‘‘If you take our clenbuterol investigation . . . it was really demonstrative of what I’d like us to be doing, which is going after the website and the importer and the distributor and the trafficker,’’ Paterson says.
Just 22 cases have been
prosecuted to date, and it is expected to take another year to clear the backlog. The majority caught up in the clenbuterol sting were amateurs competing at provincial or club level.
This is reflected across the board in all anti-doping cases, with just 15 per cent of those prosecuted being professional athletes competing at the elite level, leading to criticism that the system does not differentiate between amateur and elite athletes.