“We have long known there are legitimate cases of contamination causing positive tests, as well as cases where athletes and/or their governments claim “contamination” to avoid a suspension for intentional or even systemic doping. We have advocated for years that WADA change the rules on proven contamination cases to make the system fairer for athletes. Unfortunately, we learned from WADA’s announcement today that they have been allowing China to operate on a special set of rules that allows them to disregard the WADA Code on transparency that the rest of the world is following.
As it stands, the WADA rules dictate that even if a positive test is proven to be caused by contamination, national anti-doping agencies must find a violation, disqualify results, and make a public announcement. The public announcement is mandatory under the current rules, and we must all play by the same rules of transparency if there’s going to be any confidence and trust in the global anti-doping system. With the Chinese positives, WADA admits that China did not follow the rules on transparency. And even if WADA believed that the Chinese positive tests were caused by contamination, China is still required to follow the rules by finding violations, disqualifying results, and making the cases public.
Additionally, the global anti-doping system is based on the principle of strict liability, meaning that if there is a positive test, it is the athlete’s burden to prove the positive was due to no fault of their own. In alleged contamination cases, not only must the source of the positive be proven, but that source must also correlate with the level of the substance in the athlete’s sample.
This was not done in the TMZ 23 cases, where the source of the TMZ is still not known. To this point, TMZ is a controlled drug, not a contaminant, and it does not magically appear in hotel kitchens. In the cases of the newly revealed Chinese positive tests, metandienone (also known as d-Bol), a hardcore steroid, is not known to be used in the livestock industry and it does not just show up in meat. A fundamental question at the heart of any claimed contamination case, which WADA refuses to answer in these cases, is what was the source of the positives?
The fact that WADA accepted these excuses and declined to enforce its own rules is a failure of the system. While the U.S., like many countries, has had alleged and proven contamination cases, as cited by WADA in today’s release, USADA followed the rules by determining that the athletes committed violations, disqualifying their results, and most importantly, announcing the positive tests and outcomes. This is what the rules require, and it is mandatory in all contamination cases.
Now, clean athletes and the world are left asking, why not follow the rules and announce the Chinese positives as required if these were truly proven contamination cases? The lack of answers to these basic questions leads to the logical conclusion that these were not cases of actual contamination, and this may have been the reason why WADA turned a blind eye when China swept them under the carpet.”
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