Countries have long tested their own athletes for doping – that could soon change

NEW YORK – The Chinese swimmers won their Olympic races, stepped onto the podiums and posed for photos with their medals in 2021. Years later, the world learnt that they had been cleared to compete despite failing doping tests.

The revelation, first published by The New York Times in 2024, created a crisis for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the group responsible for ensuring fair competition in elite sport. Chinese officials who had conducted the doping tests did not penalise the swimmers, and the agency knew about the tests but chose not to intervene.

Now, in an effort to restore its credibility, WADA is considering a major change to testing rules before major events like the Olympics. After years of largely relying on the biggest nations to screen their own athletes before major international competitions, the agency is moving closer to recommending a new system in which an independent organisation would conduct at least part of the testing.

WADA has commissioned a working group to study the feasibility of such a change. The discussions are occurring too late to affect the Winter Olympics that begin this week in Italy, but they could come into play before Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Olympics.

The global authority has strongly denied that it did anything wrong in the 2021 episode, or that the Chinese swimmers should have been barred from competing at the Tokyo Games after they tested positive for the drug trimetazidine, a banned heart medication. The Chinese anti-doping regulator found that the swimmers had ingested the substance inadvertently through food contamination, and although some experts viewed the finding as implausible, WADA agreed with the Chinese account.

When reports of how the tests were handled came to light in 2024, WADA and its long-time director general, Olivier Niggli, faced harsh criticism from some members of the global anti-doping community, notably in the US. World Aquatics, swimming’s global governing body, recommended that WADA stop permitting countries to test their own athletes, a change that WADA is now discussing.

In an interview, Niggli said the swimming episode “indicated that the testing of athletes before a major event... a portion of it, at least, should be done by an independent organisation, not by the national anti-doping body”.

He added: “The risk is, whether true or perceived, that they might have a conflict of interest or they might be biased, because if the national hero tests positive this could be an issue for the country.”

The working group is expected to provide its findings in March.

“This is not something that would take ages to be implemented,” Niggli said.

It was an earlier Winter Olympics that was at the centre of the worst doping scandal in sports history.

Russia, in a scheme that incorporated operatives of its domestic security agency, swopped out dirty samples from its athletes during the 2014 Winter Olympics for clean ones, allowing cheating athletes to go undetected. An investigation found that Russia had been manipulating the doping records of its athletes for years, corrupting scores of international events, including other Olympic Games and world championships.

A scandal involving a heart drug marred the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, where Kamila Valieva – then a 15-year-old figure skating star – competed despite having tested positive for the same banned drug (trimetazidine) as the Chinese swimmers.

WADA’s biggest critic has been the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Its chief executive officer, Travis Tygart, suggested that the push to take responsibility away from domestic testers was an overreaction to the conduct of “a couple of bad apples”.

Before Olympic competitions, most anti-doping tests are carried out by national bodies, and by individual federations for some of the biggest sports. The pre-Olympics testing programme is devised by the International Testing Agency (ITA), a group formed after the scale of Russia’s cheating programme was uncovered, that is responsible for testing conducted during the Games themselves.

Niggli said that under a new system, testing before competitions could be put in the hands of private companies, which already carry out anti-doping work, or greater responsibility could be given to the ITA. Others are sceptical of the independence of that agency, which receives millions of dollars in annual funding from the International Olympic Committee and includes representatives of the committee itself.

Testing before major competitions currently differs by sport and country, and how and when athletes are tested is constantly adjusted as science evolves. Top athletes in sports like swimming, track and cycling are expected to provide a so-called “one-hour whereabouts window” every day of the year to allow testers to make surprise visits.

That type of testing has proved successful in track and field, which in recent years has caught many high-profile athletes.

Canadian swimmer Penny Oleksiak, who has won seven Olympic medals, is currently serving a two-year suspension for three “whereabouts failures”. Oleksiak has denied taking any banned substances.

On Feb 2, Italian news media reported that an Italian biathlete, Rebecca Passler, had tested positive for a banned substance in what was believed to be the first doping case in the run-up to the 2026 Winter Games. NYTIMES