Anti-doping bodies have called for athletes’ blood and urine samples to be stored for ten years, to enable technology to catch up with substances that currently evade detection.
A consensus statement by international anti-doping bodies, published last night (24 April 2014) in a special issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, also called for wider use of biological profiling – the athlete’s “biological passport” – which shows up even the smallest changes made to the individual’s genetic blueprint by doping substances and methods.
Their proposals form part of a comprehensive set of recommendations agreed by 24 international bodies to implement the World Anti-Doping Code 2015, published this week.
The consensus signatories, which include representatives from FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), as well as accredited anti-doping laboratories, met in November last year at FIFA’s headquarters in Switzerland to hear the latest scientific and medical evidence on doping and agree priorities for action.
In an accompanying podcast, Professor Jiri Dvorak, FIFA chief medical officer, said they met because scientific advances in performance enhancing substances and the ingenuity of sports cheats were outpacing current anti-doping strategies.
“The fight against doping has intensified over the past 10 to 15 years, but the increase in simple sampling procedures has not stopped some athletes from continuing [to cheat],” he says.
Prof Dvorak said FIFA started the biological passport initiative but it needs to be more widely applied. He agrees that while it is not a cheap solution to start with, it will more effective over time.
The statement says that tailoring the assessment of doping risk to an individual sport is also needed because cyclists or cross country skiers are likely to choose different substances and methods to illicitly boost their performance from weight-lifters or wrestlers.
It also calls for “intelligent testing programmes”, which take account of the training periods of individual sports, and the degree to which doping has become a normal part of the culture.
All sports organisations should “consistently emphasise that drug-taking behaviour is fundamentally contrary to the principles and precepts of sport—that is, against the spirit of the sport,” adds the statement.
Players competing in the FIFA World Cup in Brazil this June will be among the first athletes to be subject to the “freeze and store” initiative, which will provide the opportunity to analyse samples retrospectively over the course of a sporting career and carry out regular biological profiling.
Br J Sports Med 2014;0:1–6. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2014-093561 [abstract]
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