PARIS– O fighting this week Between Olympic officials, the anti-doping world and the United States government, the issue of eradicating drugs in sports is nothing new. They have been doing this for decades.
Tension reached a new level on the eve of the Paris Games, when the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2034 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City but inserted language into the contract requiring its leaders to pressure the U.S. government to lobby against an anti-conspiracy campaign law approved in 2020.
There is virtually no chance of the law being overturned or the IOC pulling the rug out from under Salt Lake City. Still, the rhetoric keeps flowing. A look at the main characters and problems:
The World Anti-Doping Agency was formed after the International Olympic Committee called for changes following some of the most sordid episodes of drug cheating in sport – among them, Ben Johnson’s drug-tainted expulsion from the 1988 Seoul Games and a drug scandal. doping. in the 1998 Tour de France.
Canadian lawyer Richard Pound, a heavyweight in the Olympic movement, became the founding president of WADA in 1999, launching the agency a year before the Sydney Olympics.
By 2024, the Montreal-based agency has a budget of around US$53 million. The IOC’s contribution of $25 million is matched by the collective contributions of national governments around the world.
Some say the IOC’s 50% contribution gives it too much say in WADA’s decision-making and an opportunity to override the way it runs its business.
The power of governments is diluted because several dozen countries make up the other half of the funding, and no single nation represents much more than about 3% of the budget.
The agency describes its mission as “developing, harmonizing and coordinating anti-doping rules and policies across all sports and countries.”
Does not collect and test urine and blood samples from athletes. It certifies sporting bodies, national anti-doping agencies and the global network of testing laboratories that do so.
It prepares, reviews and updates the rules that govern international sport and manages the list of prohibited substances.
WADA also runs its own investigations and intelligence unit, which has broad scope to get involved in cases around the world.
An IOC vice president, Craig Reedie, was the leader of WADA in 2016 when the Russian doping scandal erupted weeks before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Reedie and Pound, who led a major investigation into the Russian cheating system, wanted Russia out of the Rio Olympics. IOC President Thomas Bach did not.
On a heated IOC meeting in Rio, Bach won a nearly unanimous vote that allowed Russia to compete. It was a severe retrenchment from Reedie and, some say, WADA.
American authorities were upset with the way the IOC and WADA handled the Russian case, so they decided to pass a law named after Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow laboratory who turned whistleblower and ended up fleeing to the United States as a protected witness.
The Rodchenkov Act gave the US government authority to investigate “doping conspiracies” at sporting events involving US athletes, which brings the Olympic Games and most international events under its umbrella.
This has rattled officials at WADA and the IOC, who do not want the US to enforce its own anti-doping code. They lobbied against it, but in a sign of WADA’s position in the United States, the project was approved without a single dissenting vote in 2020.
Earlier this month, US authorities issued a summons to an international swimming official which could have information about the case involving Chinese swimmers who were allowed to compete despite testing positive. WADA did not pursue the case further.
With the Summer Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028, and then the Winter Games in Utah in 2034, it will be difficult for world sports leaders to avoid coming to the US, where they could also face inquiries from authorities.
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This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
