In a follow-up to the collaborative meeting held in Lausanne, Switzerland last month among USA Swimming, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and FINA, BBC Sport is reporting that an aggressive new testing approach will target the best athletes within the sport of swimming in the lead-up to the 2016 Olympic Games.
USADA CEO Travis Tygart, Science Director Dr. Matthew Fedoruk and USA Swimming representative Jim Wood joined FINA Executive Director Cornel Marculescu in late January for a discussion on such topics as FINA’s and WADA’s protocols on anti-doping programs, communication with National Federations and athletes, as well as testing plans and ‘strategies on Athlete Biological Passport’ leading up to this year’s Olympic Games.
One outcome of the meeting was the collective intensifying of efforts involved in the fight against doping in aquatics. With that goal as the target, FINA will oversee a new testing initiative aimed at the highest-performing athletes in swimming. The initiative involves testing every swimmer ranked in the top 10 for each of the 34 Olympic events between 5 and 7 times in the lead-up to Rio. Such testing will be conducted by the leading national anti-doping agencies, working closely in partnership with the USADA.
Says USADA’s Tygart of the combative testing approach, “FINA deserves a lot of credit for embracing the voice of clean athletes.”
Tygart continued, “Partnering with independent national anti-doping organisations to implement a strategic, global pre-Rio testing plan will help protect athletes’ rights and the integrity of the sport of swimming.”
Although the promise to test every athlete ranked in the top 10 marks an increase in the amount of testing overall for the sport, even with several key athletes being ranked in more than one event, three anti-doping agencies will not be taking part in the initiative – Brazil, China and Russia.
Of note the aforementioned 3 nations represented the most-tested by FINA itself. Specifically regarding Russia, Marculescu states, “We’re following Russian swimming very closely. They still have two or three (outstanding doping) cases, so we are continuing to put special attention on this federation.”
So that means they are actually gonna start testing people like Michael Phelps, right? Or is he too big to fail?
Of course they will…..and he has passed the tests for over 15 years.
Yep, Lance Armstrong passed all of his tests as well.
Fair point……but I try to distinguish between swimmers that have never failed a test, and ones that have. The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” applies to the rest of the swimming population.
The top 10 swimmers who live within the jurisdiction of a “trusted” anti-doping org (i.e. USA, UK, Aus, etc) will be tested domestically. Those who live withing the jurisdiction of a “suspect” org will be tested by FINA directly. The most important thing though, is that all the anti-doping orgs will be sharing their testing info among one another insuring accountability and integrity. Further, if a foreign athlete enters a country with a “trusted” org, then they come under the purview of that org for testing. i.e. if Cesar Cielo is in the United States, he can be tested by USADA.
This is a great day for clean sport. While this will not solve everything, it sure goes a… Read more »
Clean professional sport?? Yeah right. Not when millions are at stake. Have IAAF, FIFA, UCI, IOC, USATF, MLB, NFL drug/general cheating scandals not been enough of a proof that professional sports are rife with corruption? What makes you think USA, UK and AUS are ‘trusted?’ It doesn’t make sense that the top swimmers, coming from nations that have the most funding and more corporations involved are regarded as ‘clean’ or ‘trusted.’ Those stories are for little children.
It doesn’t say why those three countries are not participating. Have they refused? If so, where is the, “aggressive anti-doping protocol,” in this instance. Tell them to comply or they will be threatened by expulsion from the games. Zero tolerance.
Are you kidding me mate? Exclude Brazil from the Rio Games???
This is a joke. If I read this correctly, three of the worst doping countries in swimming will not participate and their swimmers will not be subject to increased testing. Come-on FINA, fish where the fish are. Kudos to participating countries to increase testing to “prove” their athletes are clean, but the key objective is to ensure a fair playing field and missing out Brazil, China and Russia in increasing top ten testing does nothing to achieve this. In fact I am sure FINA will be publically congratulating themselves on the overall increase in testing but sadly this initiative will do little eliminate the root cause of 90% of doping in swimming. #disillusioned
Russia, China and Brazil are tested … back chatter is that their NADO is not trustworthy and therefore not a part of the super-testing coalition. Credit Jim, Travis and the power of a united USA Swimming National Team for advancing this important effort.
I appreciate the effort by the USA swimming people but this is still really vague information and somewhat disturbing. Exactly who is conducting these tests? It sounds like USADA is going to look over the shoulder of the national swimming federations as they test their own athletes? Who is testing the big 3 mentioned above? It sounds like FINA is doing the testing? Or is it actually WADA or USADA?
Who is testing Hungary? I thought they did not test nationally and relied on FINA.
I hope they can go retroactive with the Athlete Biological Passport thing…they must have some samples on some of the older athletes from 2008 time period.
The fact that those are the three countries not participating surprises absolutely nobody.
It’s just so obvious. We should completely ignore their results in Rio.
We brought with us a letter signed by many of our National team athletes strongly supporting the additional testing. The letter was instrumental in convincing FINA to take this stand. Congrats to our athletes for taking a stand on this issue. Let’s only hope that the countries not directly included in this step up and decided to be part of it