David Howman, the chair of the Athletics Integrity Unit, has raised concerns about the anti-doping policies of other major sports such as football, rugby and golf. “Not many of the big sports have a robust anti-doping programme,” he said. “Many people in team sports will go through their careers without being tested once.”
On a day when the AIU hailed a new technique being used for the first time at the World Athletics Championships to detect doping cheats, Howman was especially critical of football’s approach. “There’s Fifa and the rest of the world,” he said “Fifa run a programme where they tick the boxes in terms of their in-competition testing. It’s the out of competition they find difficult.”
The former director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency said he wanted more sports to copy the AIU’s proactive approach to catching cheats. “All we can do is sit around the table and encourage them to do the things we do,” he said.
The AIU said it hoped the advance in drug testing would make it harder to use anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in sport. Brett Clothier, chief executive of the AIU, said a “blood steroid passport” – which collects information on markers of steroid doping using blood rather than urine – would be “a very effective tool” in the build-up to the Paris Olympics next year.
Clothier said that until now the athlete biological passport introduced in 2009 had been far more effective in detecting the use of drugs such as EPO, used more in distance running, rather than the steroids more used in sprinting and throwing events, but he hoped that would change. “The AIU already has quite a lot of data we can now analyse using this new technique,” he said. “But it will become more effective over time, as more data is collected.”
Clothier explained there were two new modules attached to the ABP – blood serum and endocrine – which he hoped would significantly help the fight against doping. “We are well advanced in blood serum, which in the short-term will enable us to better detect steroid use among athletes.
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“In the longer-term, the end endocrine module of the athlete biological passport will hopefully help us better detect the use of human growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-I.”