One thing about the World Anti-Doping Agency: It was transparent enough to announce in its recent report that its testing methods during the Rio Olympics did not go as planned. Almost 500 fewer drug tests were carried out at Rio 2016 than had been planned, the WADA report said. And of the 450 planned blood tests, only 47 were carried out. WADA itself qualified these incomplete anti-doping tests as “serious failings”.
WADA was especially critical of the lack of support and training given to the Rio 2016 chaperones, who were tasked with finding and informing the athletes they were required to test. On several occasions, the report said, attempts to test athletes failed because more than half of the chaperones failed to turn up or arrived very late.
Often, other volunteers at venues across the Olympics had to be called on at the last minute in order to fill in for the chaperones, despite having no relevant experience or training. Therefore, the majority of times, they had to resort to asking team officials and/or athletes from the same team where the athletes they were looking for were located.
One can imagine WADA officials wandering through the Olympic Village calling out the names of athletes who should have been taking these tests randomly and without previous notice. The element of surprise is completely gone.
Providing the names of the athletes they were seeking was highly inefficient and obviously compromised the no-notice nature of the testing because chaperones did not know where athletes were and had to ask their teammates where they were. This helter-skelter approach must have provided opportunities for experienced athletes who have been through this doping control process before and know the system’s ins and outs, not to mention unscrupulous athletes, to abuse the system.
What is the effectiveness of a testing process when an upcoming test is known to all participants? Many performance-enhancing substances could be consumed by an athlete until a date in advance of competition. The athlete would then suspend the taking of the product to permit the testing to take place, and resume consumption after the test.
Alternatively, the presence of such substances might be chemically masked, or the processing of the illegal substance assisted with the consumption of other pharmaceutical products.
A combination of financial issues and manpower issues meant that the sample collection business in Rio was not as efficient as it should have been. Transport arrangements to enable doping officers to travel to and from venues were “often inadequate, or even non-existent”. Observers said computers and printers needed to receive and print out “mission orders” sometimes did not work. Even when there were working computers, not enough log-in accounts were assigned to doping control personnel.
Doping control station managers received no on-site training on their role, no venue-specific information, and no sport-specific guidelines, and often arrived at the venue for the first time on the first day of testing.
In the midst of the Russian doping scandal which dominated the prelude to the Rio Olympics after the exclusion of a number of Russian athletes, it was crucial that the authorities did as much as possible to show they were keeping Rio 2016 clean. Instead, this was a damning report and a big blow to the credibility of anti-doping and the Olympic movement’s integrity.
The challenge for WADA was to develop a comprehensive model to permit the investigation of illegal substance use not only during Rio, but throughout the entire year. In Rio, a confined area for a limited time, the plan failed spectacularly. It follows that the organizational chaos which blighted the Games’ drugs-testing program will persist when the whole world is involved.
