WADA Anti-Doping Infractions

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released a report April 26^th indicating nearly 1600 anti-doping rules violations (ADRV) occurred in 2016.  The violations involved athletes and support staff from 117 nationalities across 112 sports. The report analyzed a total of 229, 514 samples from WADA accredited laboratories accounting for 1,595 ADRVs.

The majority of the violations, 1,326 were obtained from adverse analytical findings while the remaining violations were taken from investigations and evidence-based intelligence.  The investigative and evidence-based violations entailed 248 committed by athletes and 21 enacted by support staff.  When coupled with WADA’s 2016 Anit-Doping testing figures report that was released last year, it shows troubling findings.  Nearly 80% (79 percent) of adverse analytical findings were produced by male athletes (1,046) from results acquired in competitive testing (78 percent).  Athletes competing in the below nine sports had the highest number of ADRVs:

Countries with the most ADVRs include Italy with the most (147), followed by France (86), the United States (76) and Australia (75).  Although Russia’s participation was restricted in the 2016 Rio Olympics due to an investigation exposing wide spread state sponsored doping, Russia still tied sixth with India on 69 ADRVs.  Since soccer is ranked high with a number of ADRVs, it will interesting to see if the number of incidents change with the 2018 FIFA World Cup which is being hosted this summer in Russia.

  anti-doping