The effectiveness of the World Anti- Doping Agency’s analytical techniques
Louis Goodwin
On September 27 th , 1988, the whole sporting world was sent into shock. Two days earlier, 100,000 people packed into the Jamsil Olympic Centre in Seoul to watch Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson race a world-record 100-metre sprint time of 9.79 seconds, defeating his arch-rival Carl Lewis. However, the spirit of the Olympics was soon torn apart as it was revealed that Johnson had been tested positive for the performance-enhancing steroid stanozolol and had to be instantly deprived of his Olympic gold medal. 1 31 years later, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is facing record-high levels of athletes using performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Across almost every sporting discipline, many of the best athletes have turned to these drugs in order to boost their chances of winning major events – and as moremoney has been put in to develop these drugs, WADA is strugglingwith the challenge of detecting and preventing the use of these complex drugs. 2 Indeed, many believe that the chemical analytical techniques used byWADA are not sufficient in order to detect many of these drugs and prevent athletes fromutilizing them in sport. Others believe that although the scientific tests are increasingly thorough, WADA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have to tackle the issue of corruption in international sport and change the attitudes of athletes about taking these drugs in order to fix the now institutional problem of performance- enhancing drugs. This essay will evaluate WADA’s scientific processes and determine whether they are effective at detecting and preventing the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. As the threat of performance-enhancing drugs affecting sporting results increases, scientists working for the Anti-Doping Agency have had to continuously develop new technologies in order to make the detection of these chemicals happen more frequently, thus controlling all performance-enhancing drugs used. WADA needs to follow a clear definition of performance-enhancing drugs in order to control their use in sport – indeed, The American Academy of Pediatrics wrote in its sporting policy statement that ‘ a substance should be considered performance-enhancing if it benefits sports performance by increasing strength, power, speed, or endurance (ergogenic) or by altering body weight or body composition ’ . 3 This definition may be seen as very broad, and hence one can tell that WADA needs to take into account a large range of substances which could affect any of the factors included in this statement. To resolve this issue, WADA has had to create a Banned Substances List so to regulate the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Since its first publication in 2004, WADA has annually released a new ‘ List of Prohibited Substances andMethods ’ , containing a broad range of substances which it believes affect sporting ability. 4 In order to test an athlete for performance- enhancing drugs, samples are usually taken from an athlete’s urine then tested at one of WADA’s thirty -one accredited laboratories around the world. Dr. Alan Brailsford
1 Montegue 2012. 2 Pound 2004. 3 Gomez 2005. 4 World Anti-Doping Agency 2019.
190
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs