Taipei, 9 August 2017 – With only three days to go before the Taipei 2017 Summer Universiade Athletes’ Village opens, anti-doping preparations are already in place to ensure testing in and out of competition throughout the 12-day event.
Chairman of the FISU Medical Committee Dusan Hamar will be responsible for FISU’s overseeing of doping controls, including the out of competition testing, which will begin when the Village officially starts to welcome athletes on 12 August.
"There will be about 750 samples collected, out of which around 10 percent will occur before competition," Hamar said. "The exact number depends on additional requests for testing in the case of national records, namely in swimming or track and field. FISU Medical Committee members will be supervising collections, and doping control stations will be arranged at every venue with an additional one in the Athletes’ Village."
Working alongside the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), FISU has made it a top priority to educate athletes, coaches and institutions on the role they can play.
The two organisations collaborated on an anti-doping e-textbook with the Gwangju Summer Universiade Organising Committee in 2015, to support university students from all over the world in the fight against doping in sport. The e-textbook is freely available to download here: http://antidopinglearninghub.org/en
A WADA-accredited lab in Tokyo will be used throughout the Universiade for sample analysis, and Hamar confirmed that a range of sports will be tested, as well as specific testing for any suspicious activity or results.
"The test distribution plan has been prepared by the Organising Committee’s Doping Control Department under the guidance of the FISU Medical Committee. It respects WADA’s technical document for sport specific analyses, which not only test on ranking but also has some flexibility to test any suspicious intelligence information gained during the Games."
As well as the competition testing, Hamar also praised FISU’s focus on educating participants about the role of anti-doping in sport as well as their "Check-Up Your Heart" initiative, the largest cardiac evaluation of elite athletes ever.
"Education and maintaining awareness of the doping problem is an important part of the anti-doping fight. There will be an educational booth in the Athletes’ Village, where participants will have the opportunity to extend their knowledge on doping," said Hamar. "The Check-Up Your Heart team will work hard to reach a target of screening 2,000 Universiade athletes. The two main goals are to obtain more precise information on the incidence of cardiac abnormalities among elite athletes, and to offer the opportunity of a complex heart screening to the athletes who do not have access to such sophisticated technology in their home countries."
The Taipei 2017 Summer Universiade begins on 19 August and will run until 30 August.
For more information:
Contact: Anna Manuelian
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The International University Sports Federation – FISU
Founded in 1949, FISU stands for Fédération Internationale du Sport Universitaire (International University Sports Federation). FISU was formed within university institutions in order to promote sports values and encourage sports practice in harmony with and complementary to the university spirit. Promoting sports values means encouraging friendship, fraternity, fair-play, perseverance, integrity and cooperation amongst students, who one day may have responsibilities and even key positions in politics, the economy, culture and industry.
Open to student-athletes aged between 17 and 25 (for events in 2016 and 2017 the upper age is still 28), FISU’s events consist of Summer and Winter Universiades and the World University Championships. Universiades are multisport events staged in odd-numbered years, while the World University Championships are single-sport events, staged in even-numbered years. Besides its sporting events, FISU stages educational events, such as the FISU Forum on University Sport, the FISU World Conference on Development through Sport, the FISU World Conference on Innovation - Education - Sport, the FISU Sport Education Summit and the FISU Seminars.
With FISU’s motto being "Excellence in Mind and Body", all events include educational and cultural aspects, bringing together sport and academia from all over the world to celebrate in a true spirit of friendship and sportsmanship. FISU cooperates in developing its events and programmes with all major international sports and educational organisations. As major outcomes of those collaborations, in 2015, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) proclaimed the International Day of University Sport to be celebrated on 20 September, and the Anti-Doping Textbook and teaching materials were developed with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
FISU is composed of 170 Member Associations (National University Sports Federations). The FISU General Assembly elects the members of the FISU Executive Committee, its board of directors. Fourteen permanent committees advise the Executive Committee in their specialised areas. For the daily administration of FISU, the FISU Executive Committee relies on the Secretary General, who is assisted by the FISU staff. FISU’s headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland.
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