The World Anti-Doping Agency at 20: progress and challenges

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was established in 1999 in an atmosphere that combined frustration with the lack of leadership on anti-doping provided by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and optimism that at long last clean athletes would have protection from corrupt sports organisations, athletes, coaches and medical staff. If the optimism outweighed the frustration it was short lived as it soon became clear that the tangle of competing interests (political, commercial, legal and organisational) that had stymied the development of a harmonised policy towards doping over the previous 20 years or so had not disappeared but was simply adapting to the characteristics of the anti-doping policy regime that had WADA at its heart. The establishment of WADA took place within a context of mutual distrust between governments and international sport organisations. On the one hand governments and governmental organisations such as the Council of Europe pointed to the evidence of widespread doping in many Olympic sports as illustrated by the 15 athletes who tested positive for steroids, and the large number of athletes who withdrew from the 1983 Pan-American Games once it became known that urine analysis would be by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and by the ‘lost’ set of positive test results from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic games (Dimeo et al. 2011). Trust in the commitment of the IOC to tackling doping was further undermined by the statement by IOC President Samaranch in 1998 that doping was an action that ‘firstly, is harmful to an athlete’s health and, secondly, artificially augments his performance . If it’s the second case . it’s not doping’ (El Mundo 1998, quoted in Ritchie and Jackson 2014, p. 203). On the other hand international sport organisations, particularly the IOC, were acutely aware of the extent to which sport’s value was, for many countries, largely (if not solely) as a resource in international politics, particularly associated with the Cold War and apartheid in South Africa. The subordination of sport to national interests was well established and documented by the late 1980s (Strenk 1978; Espy 1979; Hughes and Owen 2009; Peppard and Riordan 1993) and confirmed by investigations in Canada (Dubin 1990) and Australia (Parliament of Australia 1989). The IOC could, with considerable justification, point to the duplicity of governments in either colluding with their sport organisations in the doping of athletes or wilfully ignoring the issue. The establishment of WADA, the speed of acceptance of the World Anti-Doping Code in 2003 by international sport organisations and the rapid ratification by governments of the 2005 UNESCO Convention Against Doping in Sport created the impression of global commitment to the ideals of drugfree sport. However, whatever optimism had been generated by the establishment of WADA was relatively short-lived as it soon became clear that much of the commitment was superficial and mere ‘politics of appearance’ (Ritchie and Jackson 2014, p. 196). Major international federations were still placing commercial interests ahead of commitment to anti-doping. For example, according to the UCI’s reform commission report (UCI 2015), that was published following the revelations regarding the history of doping by Lance Armstrong, the UCI had, for many years previously, seen Lance Armstrong as: