New Delhi: For long, anti-doping strategies have revolved around nabbing the “cheats” and educating the gullible but having got the “maximum possible results” out of this plan of action, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is aggressively directing its resources and focus towards the “criminal kingpins” supplying banned substances.
“The athlete is actually the victim. We have to target supply chains,” said WADA’s Director of Intelligence and Investigations Gunter Younger, a former head of the Cybercrime Division at the Bavarian Landeskriminalamt (law enforcement agency) in Germany.
He was speaking at the Global Anti-Doping Intelligence and Investigations Network (GAIIN) Final Conference here and made it clear in no uncertain terms that “organised crime” was now fully entrenched in the “increasingly sophisticated” doping networks.
“When 1.8 billion doses of banned Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) are prevented from entering the market by out operations, it gives you an idea of the scale of the danger we face. They represent the lives saved.
“For perspective, India has a population of 1.4 billion people and even if all of them got a dose of these substances, there would still be several 100 million left,” Younger said.
“But action like this also sends out a strong message to those who cheat that ‘we will infiltrate criminal networks with our whistle-blowers’,” he added.
Younger was a member of the WADA commission, which investigated the shocking systemic doping in Russian athletics in 2015.
WADA’s ongoing ‘Operation Upstream’, which is being carried out with assistance from INTERPOL and law enforcement agencies of 20 countries, including India’s CBI, has prevented 90 tonnes of PEDs from reaching the market.
The biggest producer of PEDs and steroids happens to be India, which hosted the GAIINS Final Conference and also conducted two workshops last year in collaboration with WADA for greater intelligence gathering and improvement in investigation techniques.
The new approach takes forward the gains made from the testing and compliance policy.
“Amount of tests are not a reflection of whether the system is improving. Testing can only detect two out of 11 violations. Education works to an extent, you keep telling kids to avoid unintentional and intentional doping.
“I can’t tell you the number of kids that I have seen traumatized by their positive tests because they had no idea what they had taken. And that’s why it is important to crack down on PED traffickers,” he said.
“We may never eliminate doping but we can certainly make it harder, costlier and risky for those who supply such drugs into the market,” he added.
WADA President Witold Banka also acknowledged the dangers by talking about the lesser risk and greater profit in smuggling of PEDs given that most countries still do not have penal provisions for such activities.
“These (criminal) networks exploit legal loopholes. What we are facing is a public health problem. This reality is clear. (And that’s why) we are expanding our vision beyond testing,” Banka said.
WADA’s recalibrated anti-doping approach relies heavily on cooperation from law enforcement agencies. Its agreement with INTERPOL has been a robust one for more than a decade now.
INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre’s Director Francesco Portugal gleefully announced how an operation in Portugal was in progress to nab traffickers while he was speaking here.
“Globalisation and digitalisation has led to crime being committed in a sophisticated manner and that’s why coordination and shared commitment between agencies is important,” he said.
Younger said disruption of supply has shown itself to be a high-result-yielding method in the fight against doping.
“We are creating a lasting shift in how doping is addressed. And intelligence and investigation is now key. We have disrupted criminal networks. And it’s not the job of one organisation to carry out anti-doping. It’s collective action,” he said.
“We coordinate with law enforcement through our whistleblowers and tip them off on locations. In return we seek the list of clients, and so far we have managed to identify 11,500 such individuals, including coaches and teams,” he added without divulging more.
“Doping, since it’s not criminal mostly, is easy for organised crime to get in and they are already there. They just don’t want us to see them,” he added.
Speaking about the whistleblowers, Younger said he was surprised to see that many of them reached out to him for love of sport.
“Informants or whistleblowers are mostly either seeking reduction in sanctions or money but there is a third group and surprisingly this one does it because it believes in clean sport,” he said.
