The governing bodies of sports who want the World Anti-Doping Agency to catch and punish cheats for them will have to wait for two years, WADA president Craig Reedie said on Friday. “You can’t change the whole anti-doping system in a short period, and work is ongoing to find out what investment is needed,” Sir Reedie told Reuters. “There are a whole range of issues concerning technical arrangements and political arrangements. We are working though it, and if this is going to work the way the IOC have proposed, it will not be till 2018.”
In December, after a series of doping scandals in athletics and other sports, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) reiterated its zero-tolerance policy to doping cheats and put forward a plan for change. That involved the setting-up of a new, independent testing and results agency under the leadership of WADA and recommended that sports should transfer their doping control operations to this new organization. International sports federations and governments, which are 50 percent partners of WADA, should fund the reform process, said the IOC, which also proposed that all sanctions be carried out not by the sports themselves, but by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
This story first appeared in the blog, The Sport Intern. The editor is Karl-Heinz Huba of Lorsch, Germany. He can be reached at ISMG@aol.com. The article is reprinted here with permission of Huba.