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LAUSANNE, Switzerland: Olympic cheats are likely to be found and
left at home, said recently-elected World Anti-Doping Agency
President John Fahey here on Wednesday.
WADA Director General David Howman also said
that leading athletes competing in the Beijing Olympics would be
targeted for pre-Olympic, out-of-competition testing by an
International Olympic Committee antidoping task force.
“We are working with the IOC to help them look
for appropriate targets and we will give them advice on who to
target,” Howman said.
“We have to think like cheats to catch cheats.
I won’t tell you how we do that. But I want athletes to be really
worried that they’re going to get caught.”
Fahey rejected the suggestion that the drug
testers could be lagging behind the dope users at next August’s
Olympic Games.
“I don’t think that’s the perception,”
he said. “With the out-of-competition tests prior to Beijing,
there is a likelihood that the cheats will be found and left at
home. WADA is confident that this will be the most effective
antidoping program at any Olympic Games.”
Fahey emphasized that out-of-competition testing
is the “primary responsibility of each federation,” and added
that the “tentacles of doping” had seeped “deep into
society.”
“This is a broad-based relentless effort,”
Fahey said. “We have a serious duty to serve and to combat doping.
Fighting against doping is one of the defining challenges of our
age—for the health of all athletes and the millions who aspire to
excel in sport.”
Citing the seven-year reign of the disgraced
Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones, who never failed a drug test, as
evidence that out-of-competition testing was key to ensuring a clean
Olympics, Howman also laid responsibility at the door of the
national federations.
“WADA is working with the national federations
to ensure that those in their registered testing pool are tested
before the games,” he said. “There are many people responsible
for who goes to Beijing, not least the Olympic Committee that
selects them. We are saying that it’s those people, that we look
to now to show responsibility.
Amongst a raft of measures included in WADA’s
new antidoping code targeting drug-taking athletes and the networks
that support them are financial sanctions, an athlete’s passport
of blood values, more efficient whereabouts programs, increased
out-of-competition testing and penalties for national federations
that fail to comply with WADA’s antidoping code.
National Olympic Committees that are not
compliant with the Unesco-adopted WADA code by January 2010 will be
ineligible to host either a winter or summer Olympics.
“Athletes have the right to compete in
competition that is safe and fair. Those nations that are not
compliant to the code, I find difficult to defend, when a
universally-approved standard has become available in every sport.
-- AFP
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