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Too often athletes, I think, have had the impression or the feeling, in the area
of doping, that it's just another attack on athletes by people my age, who wear
suits and that it was against athletes instead of for athletes. So, we brought them
inside the governments. As we have in the IOC now, itself, we have fifteen
athlete-members who are active Olympic athletes; we brought them inside on
the dispute resolution mechanism, the court of arbitration for sport and our
experience on all these occasions has been that the athletes have been very, very
positive contributors to the process and that to bring them inside the governments
of the instructors has added not only to the creditability, but also in many respects
the relevance of the concerns that they bring.
We can say that even before we had the active athlete members that thirty
or forty of the IOC members were formal Olympic athletes; I was; but that's a
long time ago. What you need now are people who are in the field, who know
what the conditions are, who know what the pressures are, who know what the
temptations are of competition today.
So, starting in November of 1999 we formed WADA. We began operations
early in 2000 and we had two things that we wanted to do, leading up to the
Olympic Games in Sydney. The first was to institute a program across all of the
Olympic Sports of unannounced, out-of-competition testing. We negotiated with
each of the twenty-eight summer Federations, the testing protocols allowing us
to do on their behalf out-of-competition tests. It was a very interesting process
because, although we had huge co-operation from each of the International
Federations, we found, as we examined some of their statutes, that they did not
even have the possibility of doing unannounced, out-of-competition testing. So,
during the early part of the year 2000, they actually had to change the rules in
order be able to do the testing. So we did the vote, 2000 tests leading up to the
Games in Sydney, and for the first time there was a completely independent
international agency doing it. There was no question of any bias, no question
of any failure to report the positive test, no case of a failure to act on that kind of
a test. The result was that every athlete who came to the Games in Sydney was
subject to being tested out of competition and we think that had a very good
effect on the preparations for Sydney. It's quite clear when you added to that
particular aspect of our activities the fact that we now have a reliable test for DPO,
meant that a lot of people who might have come to the Games, did not come and
that helps the athletes who are taking part.
The other objective for 2000 was to provide a service at the time of the Games
called "Independent Observers". There have been many suspicions over the years
that at the time of the Olympic Games there are positive tests that are reported or
tested or non-acted upon and the result of all of that is, that the people we
are viewing with some suspicion, the whole operation of the Olympic Games; and
we wanted to make sure that there were no questions at all about the... evenhandedness,
the fairness and the thoroughness of the doping control process at the
time of the Games. We established a team of about fifteen people who followed
the process from the collection of the samples, the custody, the analysis
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