Editorial
Bol saga highlights need for action to reshape sports integrity
Australian middle-distance runner Peter Bol was in the tiny independent principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain when he got a call from his US-based lawyer Paul Greene. After being suspended in January for testing positive in an A sample for erythropoietin, or EPO, Greene had good news – Boll had been exonerated.
Sports Integrity Australia, which had overseen the testing process, had issued a statement admitting a second sample from Bol contained no synthetic EPO, which triggered retesting of the two samples by a second laboratory. Both came up negative.
Peter Bol’s name was smeared, but he was eventually cleared of sports doping.Credit: Getty
In light of the devastating emotional, reputational and potentially career-ending impact the false positive result had had on Boll, how had Australia’s peak anti-doping agency got it so wrong?
The integrity body was adamant it was not to blame. Quite the opposite. Its statement emphasised that the World Anti-Doping Agency, which sets the global standards and guidelines for drug testing, had acknowledged that “at all times” Sport Integrity Australia followed the rules set by the international body.
An apology to Boll? Nothing was offered. Recognition of the ramifications on his career? Not a word. An explanation for how his initial positive test result was leaked to the media? Again, no clarification or mea culpa. Instead, in clear evidence to the contrary, it brazenly stated that Australian athletes “should have confidence in the anti-doping system”.
The method used to detect synthetic EPO, a substance designed by biomedical companies to resemble as closely as possible the naturally occurring EPO hormone produced by the kidneys, is notoriously involved. It can take an accredited lab four days to analyse a single urine sample. Yet so far, the Australian Sports Drug Testing Laboratory, which botched its analysis of Bol’s sample, has also offered no public explanation for why this happened.
If the case of Peter Boll was a one-off, then maybe such a dreadful mistake could be excused. But it is not. As detailed by Chip Le Grand in Saturday’s Good Weekend, as testing becomes increasingly sensitive, the prospect of athletes testing positive for illegal substances is escalating. Critics argue that while more sophisticated testing may uncover athletes who are using elaborate schemes to mask their use of banned substances, it is also netting those who may have inadvertently digested minuscule amounts of such drugs.
Le Grand tells the story of Brenton Rickard, a former Australian breaststroke swimmer who set a world record and won world titles and Olympic medals. He was labelled a drug cheat seven years after competing at the London Olympics when more sensitive testing picked up tiny traces of furosemide, a diuretic that can conceal the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Rickard vehemently denied knowingly taking the drug, but was cleared only when the World Anti-Doping Agency lifted the level of the diuretic that could be legally detected. He is not alone. There are too many cases of international athletes being slapped with a ban for testing positive for an illegal substance, only to be cleared once it was proven that they had unwittingly digested the drug.
The pitfalls in the system were best illustrated earlier this year by Katerina Nash, a mountain biker and cross-country skier who represented the Czech Republic at the Olympics. She avoided a four-year ban for testing positive to minute traces of a banned substance only after eventually proving that she had ingested the substance while giving medicine drops to her pet dog.
The Age would never argue for the drug testing of athletes to be wound back. The latest figures from WADA show that in 2020, of nearly 150,000 samples collected worldwide, 1007 came up positive for an illegal substance, More than 650 resulted in sanctions. Unsurprisingly, the largest number of athletes testing positive were from Russia, with 135 banned, but the remainder, in a stark reminder of how widespread the problem is, came from another 90 countries.
Numbers like those make a strong case for ongoing vigilance. Drug testing is the cornerstone of that deterrence. But when that process, which is spelt out in the World Anti-Doping Code, is the antithesis of the customary judicial principle of innocent until proven guilty, the stakes for getting it right are considerably higher.
For athletes to have any chance of clearing their name, it is an onerous and expensive undertaking. Even if athletes can prove they didn’t intentionally take the banned drug, this is not enough. To be cleared of any wrongdoing, they must show they exercised “utmost caution” in every aspect of their lives to avoid the most distant risk of a banned substance entering their system.
For a system that can end an athlete’s career in the blink of an eye, it clearly has some fundamental flaws.
Peter Bol’s career was close to being crushed because of a faulty reading by one laboratory of one sample. Considering the consequences, how could that drug testing process be deemed rigorous? For all the assurances of Sport Integrity Australia, what confidence can any athlete, Australian or not, have in the testing for EPO?
WADA has committed to reviewing what happened in this instance, but there are broader concerns. There have been too many cases of athletes being caught up in the dragnet of testing who have later proven to have inadvertently taken an illegal substance. And even when athletes are cleared, the reputational damage no doubt lingers long past the date of exoneration.
It is not enough to leave these shortcomings in the system, including an extremely damaging leak, to a review by the very body that creates the rules. It is time for the Australian government to step in and carry out its own investigation of what went wrong in the case of Bol, and to exert pressure on Sport Integrity Australia and the world anti-doping body WADA to ensure that it never happens again.
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