IAAF accused of blocking report on doping cheats

LONDON: The world athletics governing body blocked the publication of a report that showed as many as a third of the world’s top athletes admitted using banned performance-enhancing techniques, The Sunday Times reported.

The authors of the report told the British newspaper that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) blocked publication of the study, which was carried out four years ago.

However, the IAAF responded by saying there was nothing new about these revelations.

“The IAAF’s delaying publication for so long without good reason is a serious encroachment on the freedom of publication,” the University of Tuebingen in Germany, which carried out the research, said in a statement according to the paper.

Researchers from the university were given access to elite athletes at the 2011 world championships in Daegu, South Korea and concluded in their research that between 29 and 34 percent of the 1,800 competitors at the championships had violated anti-doping rules in the previous 12 months.

“These findings demonstrate that doping is re markably widespread among elite athletes, and remains largely unchecked despite current biological testing programmes,” the report concluded.

The IAAF responded by issuing a statement denying it had suppressed publication of the document.

“This is not a new story, having first been raised on German TV in 2013, and those concerns were addressed by the IAAF at the time,” said the statement.

“The study in question was a social science based survey conducted by Wada and a team of researchers at the Athletes’ village in Daegu.

“The purpose of the study was to assess the reliability of potential new methods of evaluating the prevalence of doping in sport using more of a social science approach (randomised-response survey).

“The survey was intended to be extended to multi-sport events and no publication was ever evoked.”

The study was funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), but they gave the IAAF power to veto publication in exchange for access to the athletes at Daegu, Wada confirmed to The Sunday Times on Friday.