WADA acclaims latest doping initiative

By John Mehaffey

LONDON (Reuters) - Out-of-competition testing proved a momentous battle in the war against doping.

Then came non-analytical positives, conclusive evidence or confessions of doping, which sent triple Olympic champion Marion Jones to jail for six months.

Now the International Cycling Union (UCI), running a sport on the verge of collapse before it belatedly began to introduce stringent doping controls, has introduced a biological passport.

All professional riders are compelled to provide blood samples to the UCI, which will create a unique medical profile of individual athletes. The original profile will be compared to the findings after the athletes have undergone dope tests to see if there are any significant discrepancies.

Although the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has withdrawn its support for the UCI project because of the cycling body's lawsuit against former WADA president Dick Pound, the innovation is seen as a major breakthrough.

"Its potential, and we don't want to overstate anything, is huge. It's one of the major strategies that we've advanced here," WADA director general David Howman told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"Each athlete has a passport which he or she can exhibit at any time. It's pretty easy to see if they are clean, that's the objective.

"It's been on the horizon, it's a question of making it work in practice."

Each of these ground-breaking initiatives has been prompted by doping scandals which resonated well outside the sporting world.

Out-of-competition testing was introduced in 1989, the year after Ben Johnson tested positive following his world record-shattering win in the Seoul Olympic 100 meters final.

NON-ANALYTICAL POSITIVES

Triple Olympic champion Florence Griffith-Joyner, who in 1988 set world women's records in the 100 and 200 which have not been approached let alone broken, promptly retired. Griffith-Joyner, who never failed a doping test, died in 1998.

Ten other women's world records in Olympic events, set before the testers started to arrive unannounced, remain on the books.

Non-analytical positives followed the BALCO laboratory scandal in 2003 when a federal raid discovered Jones's name on the list of clients.

In the following year sprinter Michelle Collins became the first athlete to receive a ban without returning a positive test when she admitted using the blood-booster EPO (erythropoietin) and THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), the steroid especially designed by BALCO to fool the testers.