Pandemic opened a door for cheats
Were anti-doping rules circumvented in 2020?
The global anti-doping system often finds itself playing catch-up with dopers. Heading into the Tokyo Olympics, it adds a global pandemic to already numerous hurdles it faces in ensuring those who claim medals haven’t cheated their way to the podium.
With the Olympics formally opening Friday, anti-doping organizations find themselves emerging from a 16-month period in which COVID-19 has derailed at worst and disrupted at best their preGames efforts. Just how much the pandemic has opened the door for athletes to enhance their performance won’t be clear when the Olympic flame goes out, though.
Like any Games, a decade-long window yawns ahead to retest samples. But with the pandemic’s effects on the system, some worry about what could be revealed about these Games years down the road.
“It’s always been a tricky task to catch people via testing,” said Callum Skinner, athlete lead for Global Athlete and a two-time Olympic cycling medalist in Rio. “It always seems that the system is a few steps behind, but it’s been fair to say that during COVID, it’s very much lagging behind.”
To be sure, Skinner and others accept that public health took priority over anti-doping efforts – especially in the spring of 2020 when out-of-competition testing fell to a fraction of its prior year levels. PPE had to be prioritized for health care workers and not doping control officers. Putting them on planes to test athletes in other countries wasn’t an option.
Anti-doping leaders say they have been able to ramp up testing later in the year, despite a significantly reduced number of competitions, and have relied on other tools like intelligence and investigations. They can also look for changes in athletes’ biological passports, which monitor selected biological variables, over time to look for changes that might indicate doping.
“I personally don’t believe that during this month of March (2020), suddenly all the athletes have said, ‘There’s a lockdown. Let’s dope,’ ” said Benjamin Cohen, director general of the International Testing Agency.
Led by an expert group it assembled before the Games were postponed from their original date, the ITA issued testing recommendations and extended its pre-Olympics testing program to try to close the kind of gaps that left high-risk athletes untested in the months leading up to Rio 2016.
And for every Olympics, anti-doping officials try to catch dopers even years afterward. Stored Games samples have been critical in reallocating medals from the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics, with more than 130 anti-doping rule violations coming from that retesting effort.
So even in ideal circumstances, the anti-doping system struggles to keep up. But the challenges it faced during the pandemic are likely to cast a shadow over athletes’ performances in Tokyo.
“It’s always the case that people have to suspend disbelief to enjoy the Olympics because you don’t get that certainty ahead of time,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor who studies sport governance at the University of Colorado. “When we see fantastic performances in Tokyo, it’s going to raise the same questions that we get normally, but it’s just going to be a little bit amped up because what may or may not have happened during the pandemic with the (national anti-doping organizations).”
Targeting high-risk athletes in high-risk sports
Even before the pandemic, anti-doping faced obstacles in policing sports. The organizations that make up the system – both national and regional agencies that test athletes, along with their international federations or the ITA – often lack for funding. The science lags behind the latest doping methods. And the strength and support for national anti-doping organizations varies from country to country.
But the pandemic might have hampered anti-doping enough to matter in Olympic competitions.
In April 2020, with parts of the world locked down, anti-doping organizations collected just 569 samples – or 4% of what they had done in April 2019, according to testing figures from the World Anti-Doping Agency. It took until July for them to get above 50% of the prior year’s out-of-competition testing and by the end of the year had nearly returned to normal.
Cohen said the ITA – which runs antidoping for several international federations and major event organizers, including the Olympics – was able to reprogram 90% of its scheduled testing for later in 2020.
“Of course, the pandemic has had different evolution in different countries or regions of the world,” said Jorge Leyva, CEO of the Institute of National Anti-Doping Organizations, “but I think as far as we can see from the WADA reports, global testing is moving forward. I think we can be confident that we antidoping organizations, that as NADOs but also international federations, are doing whatever they can, what it takes to test athletes and to be there and promote clean competitions.”
Part of that is targeted testing of likely Tokyo participants. The ITA’s expert group, which is made up of five representatives each from national agencies and international federations, issued about 26,000 testing recommendations in late 2020.
Looking at all 33 Summer Olympic sports, the group categorized sports into four groups from high to low risk. It also considered athletes’ previous testing histories, any anti-doping rule violations and countries’ doping history.
Those in the highest risk sports were designated to be tested more, generally, so a weightlifter probably has been tested more than an archer. The ITA set up a portal to allow anti-doping organizations to coordinate which tests they would take on specific athletes. About 80% of those recommendations were implemented, according to the ITA.
Despite its extensive recommendations, the ITA noted “some lack of response and diligence from a limited group of concerned actors,” which the expert group “tried to mitigate” and that the ITA reported to WADA.
With testing authority two months out from the start of the Games, a first for the Olympics, the ITA can step in to test. That’s partly to avoid the kind of testing gaps in the system before the Rio Games five years ago.
According to a WADA independent observer report after the Games, more than 4,000 athletes – or nearly 36% of all athletes – had no testing in 2016 before the Olympics. Nearly half of those athletes were in higher risk sports.
“The idea is for us really to make sure that no high-risk athletes coming from high-risk countries taking part in a high-risk discipline would show up in Tokyo without being properly tested,” Cohen said, “so I would say it’s more of an emergency testing fund than really us doing the job in the place of a national agency.”
Concern heading into Olympics
The ITA hopes to restore confidence in the anti-doping system beleaguered by scandal in recent years, none larger than Russia’s system that doped athletes and subverted anti-doping controls in major competitions, including the Olympics.
Created in 2018, the ITA is operating testing during the Games in coordination with the Japan Anti-Doping Agency. It expects to collect about 5,000 samples.
The ITA has also opened a long-term storage facility, funded with $5 million from the International Olympic Committee, to save samples collected this year for reanalysis for up to 10 years.
Though it is free for anti-doping organizations to use, about 40 have signed up.
Stored Olympic samples give antidoping officials a chance to reallocate medals, and the Beijing and London reanalysis have been the most successful in retroactively catching doping cheats. The window to retest for 2012 extends into next year.
Come August, samples from Tokyo will have a 10-year window to be examined. To the extent doping violations prompt reallocation of medals – whether because of the pandemic’s effect on the system or not – that will be difficult for athletes after potentially losing out on medals, sponsorship and funding to compete.
“For it to retrospectively be reallocated just isn’t good enough, so we really need anti-doping to catch up both in terms of intelligence and testing capability,” said Skinner. “That would be my big fear for Tokyo, that 10 years down the line we find out that there was actually quite a lot of instances going on that hadn’t been detected beforehand, as well as the testing system being behind.”