After 3½ months of resistance, Fifa leaders will meet representatives of the
World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) in Zurich today, under pressure to conform
to the kind of legislation that led to Christine Ohuruogu being banned for a
year from athletics.
Football has refused to subscribe to Wada’s new procedures since they became
part of a resolution agreed in Madrid last November. The two sides were
unable to reach agreement at a convention in Montreal last month. Wada
officials met the FA in London on Wednesday and now Sepp Blatter, the Fifa
president, and John Fahey, the new Wada president, try again.
The sticking point is the “whereabouts” system, of which Ohuruogu famously
fell foul. The new Wada code, which was published on Wednesday, insists that
all sports implement a system in which professional athletes have to inform
the anti-doping authorities of their whereabouts for one hour of each day,
every day of their working lives. This means that players would have to
account for their whereabouts throughout the year and would clarify
situations such as that in which Rio Ferdinand was banned for eight months
after missing a test at Manchester United’s training ground. The England
defender said that he had forgotten about the test and had gone on a
shopping trip.
Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’
Association, is opposed to the whereabouts system. “This is unnecessary and
intimidating,” he said. “It’s intrusive.”
David Howman, the Wada director-general, insisted on Wednesday that there was
no tension in this situation, but added: “We would expect Fifa to
co-operate. Fifa is now a Wada-coded client and Blatter is on our board.”
This is an early test of Fahey’s presidency. Ultimately, if a sport is held
to be non-compliant, the consequence is removal from the Olympic programme.
Football does not stand alone in this, but it is the most entrenched. Other
team sports have raised issues with the new International Standards for
Testing (IST), although some already have the kind of whereabouts systems
that football is against. Rugby union introduced whereabouts 18 months ago
for the top 50 players of each leading union; rugby league incorporated it
for the close season.
Roger Federer has to give his close-season whereabouts in tennis and British
Olympians have been educated on the whereabouts IST in the months since the
Madrid resolution.
Sportsmen and women are required to be available for testing in the close
season because it is well documented that one of the best forms of cheating
involves disappearing for a few weeks and ingesting steroids that will make
an athlete faster, stronger and fitter. Given that football is a game in
which speed, strength and fitness are more influential than ever,
whereabouts is an issue on which Wada remains determined not to be bullied.
“The requirements of athletes in different sports need to be consistent,” Andy
Parkinson, the head of operations at Drug-Free Sport, the UK anti-doping
agency, said. “We see very little difference in the principles here for
athletes in team sports or individual sports. I don’t know why football is
holding out.”
Indeed, there is an argument that the system is actually simpler for
team-sport athletes. During the season, because squads train and travel as a
unit, the responsibility for their whereabouts can be dealt with by a team
administrator. It is only during close seasons and periods of injury that
they are faced with the responsibilities personally.
Taylor’s arguments against whereabouts are twofold. “You don’t want
individuals targeted at home when there is a team schedule to abide by,
that’s intrusive,” he said. “And our testing programme doesn’t show that
this is called for. If the testing we do shows that we had a problem, then
we would pursue it more.”
The point to make here is that if people are not tested out of season, they
will not be caught. “To be effective,” Nick Davies, communications director
of the International Association of Athletics Federations, said,
“anti-doping can only work if you have this massive out-of-competition
programme. Our sport gets murdered on doping, and why? Because we test. Are
the systems in other sports the same?”
In England, football is the most tested sport, with 1,116 of last year’s 1,645
tests conducted unannounced at training grounds. This compares with 730
athletics tests in the UK (337 of which were out of competition), although
given the number of competitors per sport, athletes are more likely to be
tested.
There is negligible recent evidence to suggest that football has a doping
problem. Some administrators fear that Wada’s new code will simply create a
generation of Ohuruogus in football: players who fall foul of administrative
errors without any proof whether or not they have taken
performance-enhancing drugs.
“Let’s try and apply common sense here,” Michele Verroken, founding director
of Sporting Integrity, the sports consultancy, said. “You could create an
administrative nightmare. If we retain the current whereabouts system for
team sports, there is a danger it becomes all about the admin of the
athletes and not the testing of them.”
Proof positive
Football is not a sport most people associate with drugs, but there have been
plenty of examples.
- Mark Bosnich is perhaps the biggest name in British football to be found
guilty of drug-taking. As a Chelsea player in 2002, he took a test that
showed traces of cocaine and was banned for nine months.
- Jaap Stam was given a five-month suspension while playing for Lazio after he
tested positive for nandrolone, a performance-enhancing anabolic steroid.
This was reduced by one month on appeal.
- Two other Holland internationals, Edgar Davids and Frank de Boer, tested
positive for the same drug.
- There have been drugs controversies at World Cups. In 1978, Willie Johnston
failed a test after Scotland’s defeat by Peru and was sent home.
- Sixteen years later, Diego Maradona, who had already served a 15-month ban
for cocaine use, tested positive for other prohibited substances and was
kicked out of the Argentina squad. Words by Bill Edgar
