“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a
tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his
response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t
matter.”
Tomorrow the Foundation Board
of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) will gather in Glasgow for
its most important meeting since the creation of the Agency. Since the
broadcasting of a documentary alleging systematic doping in
Russian athletics by the German public broadcaster in December 2014, the
anti-doping world has been in disarray. The various independent investigations
(the Pound Report and the McLaren Report) ordered by WADA into doping allegations
against Russian athletes have confirmed the findings of the documentary and the
truth of the accusations brought forward by Russian whistle-blowers.
Undeniably, there is something very rotten in the world anti-doping system. The
current system failed to register a widespread, and apparently relatively open,
state-sponsored scheme aimed at manipulating any doping test conducted in
Russian territory. Moreover, it was not WADA that uncovered it, but an
independent journalist supported by courageous whistle-blowers.
This is testimony to the
innocuousness of WADA’s compliance checks. The Agency loves barking in public
but hardly bites. In all fairness, it is simply not equipped to properly
enforce the rules it has proudly devised and promoted. To adequately reset the
system, the anti-doping community needs to acknowledge that until now WADA has
been more of a PR stunt than a serious global anti-doping supervisor. The practical
reality of anti-doping operations must be well understood to do so. The Agency
drafts and adopts the World Anti-Doping Code and its complementary international standards but it is unable to control the
concrete meaning that will be given to these provisions at a local level. In
other words, the world anti-doping system as it stands is a glocal construct. It is dependent on the
collaboration of local institutions (national governments, agencies,
laboratories, but also sports federations) for its operation and thus takes
different local meanings. Either the anti-doping community recognizes this
pluralist reality and renounces the ideal of a level anti-doping playing field
or the structure and operation of the system must be radically changed.
In recent weeks, key stakeholders
have indicated their preferences. Both an influential group of
national anti-doping agencies (often public bodies financed by national states)
and the International Olympic Committee have called (here and here) for WADA to exercise more stringent
compliance monitoring and to be given the proper authority to police the local
anti-doping enforcers. This is the only way forward if the widely shared ideal
of a level playing field is to be maintained. Yet, it also implies that the IOC
(representing the entire sports community) and national governments will have
to substantially increase WADA’s budget. This will most likely prove difficult
at a time when governments across the globe are focusing on tightening their
fiscal belts. The IOC, which derives huge economic revenues from its commercial
monopoly over the Olympics (and its ideals), will probably have to put its
money where its mouth is and unilaterally assume a substantial raise of WADA’s
budget (from $27,484,828 in 2015). To
illustrate the scale of the expansion needed: in 2015 WADA had only 81 employees (compared with more than 11,000
athletes participating in the Rio Olympics). In these conditions, it can hardly
monitor the particular workings of each national anti-doping agency and
laboratory around the globe. The Agency will need to recruit in-house
investigators in droves if it is to fulfil the responsibility that the IOC and
NADOs want to endow it with. If WADA stays underfunded and understaffed, we
will continue to witness just another example of organized irresponsibility. WADA
would be tasked with an impossible mission in order to deflect the blame for
failing to rein doping from other institutions that would have had the means to
act but declined to do so.
To succeed in ensuring a
more-or-less comparable enforcement of the World Anti-Doping Code around the
globe, WADA will not only require more resources. It will also need to
radically change its mind-set. The Agency must acknowledge that its anti-doping
mandate is a Sisyphus-like task. It will never be fully achieved and to even
approach achieving it will require the enrolment of whistle-blowers and the media.
For this to happen, the former must be able to trust that they will not irremediably
damage their professional/personal careers (the IOC’s treatment of Stepanova is an obvious
counter-example) and the latter would need to have access to much more publically
available data on anti-doping enforcement to know where to look.
Finally, even if WADA were to morph
into a trustworthy watchdog patrolling the globe to ensure a minimum level of
compliance with its rules and standards, it would still need to rely on the
disciplinary power of the IOC and the other Sports Governing Bodies to back-up
its monitoring activities. The controversial decision of the IOC to let the Russian athletes compete
in Rio, despite WADA’s recommendation otherwise, highlights the
resistance it might face. Enhanced monitoring and compliance checks will have a
deterrent effect only if they are followed-up by substantial sanctions.
The future of the fight against
doping is on the table this weekend. Like Alice in Wonderland, the WADA is at a fork in the road, and to choose the right path it will
need to decide first where it wants to go.