Rugby players are most tested
ONE athlete failed a drugs test in Ireland last year but Sport Ireland would not name them, or their sport, in their 2017 anti-doping report yesterday because their case is still pending, which indicates the finding is being appealed.
The report did show that Irish athletes applied for more therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) last season than in the previous Olympic year but that far less were granted.
TUEs allow the use of substances that are prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) once athletes can prove a valid medical reason for taking them.
Their usage is under the spotlight at the moment because of questions about the validity and ethics of them, particularly in international cycling and athletics.
In 2017 there was an increase of 14 per cent in Irish TUE applications (81 from 71 in 2016) but only 27 were given compared to 40 in 2016.
Track and field and rugby got six each, there were three in shooting and two apiece in rowing and cycling.
Sport Ireland’s Director of Participation and Ethics Dr Una May (above) said she was not worried about the growth in TUE applications or refusals, saying there are plenty of valid reasons for TUEs to be refused, including that athletes do not provide the necessary paperwork in time.
But she noticeably stressed that Sport Ireland has, in recent years, twice sent out warnings to medics and sporting organisations that they do not accept the use of the steroid Triamcinolone as a valid treatment for allergies. British cyclist Bradley Wiggins got a TUE for Triamcinolone before the 2012 Tour de France and a British parliamentary committee has just accused Team Sky of using it unethically, for non-medical reasons.
‘What we were reading in the House of Commons report is where there was only one doctor signing off on something. That might have acceptable a few years ago but not now and we have always been very rigorous in examining TUE applications,’ Dr May said.
The standout statistic from this year’s anti-doping report was that rugby players were the most tested athletes in Ireland last year.
Under Sport Ireland’s national testing programme (989 tests in total, including 318 blood) Irish cyclists (189) were highest tested, followed by track and field (188), rugby (145) and men’s GAA (126). However Sport Ireland also carries out paid testing for outside agencies (called ‘User Pays’) and the amount of those commissioned by rugby bodies last year was particularly high.
In 2016 two thirds of the 275 ‘User Pays’ tests in Ireland were for rugby (195) and, in 2017, rugby made up a whopping 86 per cent of those tests (272 of 315).
World Rugby commissioned 212 tests (nearly twice as many as 2016), the IRFU paid for 28, Six Nations sought 24 and European Club rugby paid for eight but the 2017 figure from World Rugby is undoubtedly skewed by Ireland hosting the Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Sport Ireland are confident their testing regime of elite athletes is really robust but admitted they are increasingly worried by the amounts of illegal steroids filtering into recreational sport here. Over 443,000 units of anabolic steroids came into Ireland in the first eight months of 2017. That was a 300 per cent increase on the 109,000 units seized in 2016 and a terrifying jump from the 21,000 units caught in 2014.
‘We have a really big concern about it. We can see it coming into the gyms and leisure industry and we are working to try to combat that,’ May said.