Play Fair
The governing body’s all-out war against athletes guilty of doping fails to uphold the ideals of sport – or of basic justice.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recently released a program to improve quality at the 32 analytical labs contracted to conduct its analyses (1).
While this may be an honest endeavor to increase effectiveness, the report also serves to turn the spotlight away from how WADA operates itself. That can’t be allowed to happen.As illustrated by several experts in this magazine (see Toying with Athletes), WADA’s policy is best described as a war against doping: the ruthless tracking and punishment of all dishonest athletes. If WADA was able to identify and penalize undoubted cheats with surgical precision, this war would be legitimate. But it cannot. There is major collateral damage: honest athletes are being incorrectly identified and handed severe penalties. This simply is not justifiable.
Children who drank cough medicine, footballers who ate tainted meat, and athletes who used ‘party’ drugs are false-positive cases – false-positive in the sense that these were not attempts to improve sportive performance and have absolutely nothing to do with dishonesty in sport, per se. In some countries, half the ‘positives’ are recreational drug detection: while potentially of interest to drug enforcement agencies, these should not fall within in the remit of WADA. The list of banned substances is enormous, but scientific evidence to support any performance-enhancing benefit is often lacking. For others, there is no threshold value, so that even a picogram identified could have dire consequences for the athelete concerned.
In contrast to court cases (2), there is no requirement for transparency from WADA on analytical procedures or proof that the quantity of banned substance found is performance enhancing. And it is effectively impossible for athletes to challenge a decision.
WADA has reacted poorly to feedback from the outside world. Questions over statistics, concerning threshold levels or the effectiveness of blacklisted compounds, have been met with letters from lawyers. Instead, WADA should embrace interaction with external experts.
And what about us? According to Douwe de Boer, a former head of IOC and WADA labs, it is the social responsibility of analytical scientists to ensure that athletes are given a fair chance. I agree.
WADA’s (rather good) magazine is called Play True (3). We urge them to Play Fair, and we invite them to respond to criticisms.
Frank van Geel
Scientific Director
Frank van Geel is owner of educational website Chromedia and Scientific Director of The Analytical Scientist. He studied analytical chemistry, specialized in mass spectrometry in the Netherlands and did several years of post-doc work in spectroscopy with Jim Winefordner at the University of Florida in the US. Then he became a science teacher and later publisher in chemistry and physics related topics. He developed numerous publications in chemistry and other sciences. He strongly supports the mission: Building online communities is the road to take. We need to strengthen the quality of analytical chemistry and we need to strengthen our community by sharing know-how and by sharing our opinions, visions and our views of the future of analytical science.
