Dope Testers Busted?
As announced Thursday, WADA, the world anti-doping agency are holding out the tin cans in hopes for funding. While several Nations were reported to have promised money, the bottom line at WADA is that they only had 25 percent of their 2003 budget of just over twenty Million dollars US.
WADA President Dick Pound (I would have called myself Richard…) indicated, as reported in Reuters, “we will soon be in a critical state”. One might wonder weather or not “Critical” status was not reached several months ago. One may also wonder if WADA and team Coast use the same accounting firm…
An interesting note is that, across all sports, WADA aimed to carry out 5,500 tests, including 750 for EPO. Given the number of events in all sports that a “World” organization would cover, the task at hand would seem almost impossible to complete even with full funding. And weather the task at hand was worthy given that a single grand tour might carry out 100 or so tests). It is also of note that the funding was not strictly for testing, but for the research required to develop new tests for drugs that have gone a step beyond EPO. Twenty million dollars is a small fraction of one percent of what drug companies spend in developing new, potentially performance enhancing, drugs, yet we are only now somewhat effective at testing for those developed several years ago…
Given the lack of support from most Nations (note both the US and England’s cash has not been received…) and the size and scope of the job at hand, the need for stiffer penalties is huge. When we do get lucky enough to catch someone stupid enough to take a shot of EPO and then race within the three-day window of effectiveness of the peepee test, we should throw the book at em, and every organization in the world (and there are too many to list) should follow the suspensions handed down from a world body.
The real shame here is that WADA may have been (and may be…) an answer to a lot of Cycling’s problems (yes I know there are other sports and blah blah blah, but bringing up the problems in Baseball does jack sh!t to solve the problem in the sport I care about). Unfortunately I don’t see any world body getting the funding to effectively control doping for all sports. And even if someone did get funding, most lucrative professional sporting organizations would not let the future of their players be controlled by an outside organization. That leaves us with the hope that Pro leagues will fund WADA, but if they can’t control it, they won’t fund it…
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