Drawbacks to Independent Anti-doping Testing

(ATR) FIFA’s former medical chief Jiri Dvorak has urged international federations not to be too hasty in their desire to set up an independent anti-doping testing body.

Jiri Dvorak, speaking to Around the Rings at the SportAccord IF Forum in Lausanne last week, addressed many of the issues that have come out of a year dogged with doping allegations in elite sport.

Anti-doping was one of the main issues of last month’s IOC Olympic summit which saw the recommendation to introduce independent testing outside of sports organizations.

Members of federations in attendance at the IF Forum were broadly in favor of such as move, with some saying that the current anti-doping system needed a complete "overhaul".

But Dvorak, a highly respected member of the sports medicine sphere, preached patience when looking at how to ensure clean athletes in sport.

"There are some sports which are more prone to doping, there are sports that are less prone to doping," Dvorak told ATR."Football is one of those which is less prone to doping and there are sports that are obviously more prone so you have to decide how you use your financial resources and human resources efficiently.

"Creating an independent agency, well you can say years ago WADA was doing almost 6000 controls a year and they reduced over the years to almost none. So this has to be very carefully assessed before you change the existing program completely.

"I would be extremely reluctant for example to change the program for football or for cycling where there is already an adapted control to the problems they have encountered and obviously the UCI did great job with creating a foundation to take care of the doping controls. That was a good step. Track and field could improve, there are other sports that could be improving and there are countries that are very difficult to reach, I know this from my own experience."

IOC president Thomas Bach has previously argued that the number of recent doping scandals showed that sports federations had too much power in their fight against drug cheats and that they were often limited by conflicts of interest.

However, Dvorak urged that federations could balance commitments by having a more "targeted approach" to anti-doping.

Dvorak said: "In order to devise a long term strategy for anti-doping you have to take the positive aspects, you have to analyze the risks and then you mitigate the risks.

"So you have to identify which sports, which countries, which athletes are more prone to be tempted to get in to the doping. A targeted approach and then design based on the risk assessment, the risk management."

Written by Christian Radnedge

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