Former investigator assails World Anti-Doping Agency

NEW YORK – A former chief investigator for the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) said on Aug 19 that the organisation was “broken beyond repair”, and had misled the public following the disclosure of its decision not to discipline 23 elite Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned drug in 2021.

The investigator, Jack Robertson, said in a five-page statement that the global body’s handling of the positive tests and its response to the criticism it has faced demonstrated that it needed to be completely restructured to become “truly independent”.

He added that the agency had made false and defamatory statements about how its top critic – the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) – handled a separate and complex doping case.

In short, Wada had accused Usada of allowing athletes who violated anti-doping rules to continue competing, in exchange for information on other violators.

Wada’s accusation that the American agency had mishandled the case and had been hypocritical in criticising Wada came amid an escalating feud between the two agencies over whether Wada is capable of policing doping in international athletics.

“Wada has gone from enforcer to appeaser,” Robertson, who helped bring down Lance Armstrong, said. “To return Wada to what it was originally crafted to accomplish, a truly independent restructured agency needs to be instituted in its place, free of corrupted puppeteers.”

In releasing the statement, Robertson, who left Wada in 2016 and has been critical of the organisation’s handling of other cases, became one of the most vocal former anti-doping officials to take their concerns public in the wake of the revelations in recent months about the positive tests among Chinese swimmers.

Usada has been at the forefront of criticising Wada since The New York Times reported in April that Wada declined to discipline the swimmers after they tested positive for a banned heart medication.

Wada in effect accepted a China Anti-Doping Agency explanation that the swimmers had unwittingly ingested small amounts of the drug through a hotel kitchen, where traces of the medication were later found.

Robertson, an American who was a veteran Drug Enforcement Administration agent before becoming an anti-doping investigator, said that he had decided to go public after he saw a statement released by Wada during the Olympics that directly attacked Usada for the aforementioned separate incident. NYTIMES