How Track’s Athletics Integrity Unit Catches Doping Cheats
The announcements of track and field’s latest doping case or multiyear suspension arrived on an almost weekly basis this spring. A world champion. An Olympic medalist. And, most recently, three record-holders in a month.
The most immediate consequence, according to the official charged with pursuing doping violations in the sport, has been to create the impression that track has a serious doping problem, one perhaps much bigger than that of other sports in the Paris Olympics. The reality, he said, is that catching athletes who break the rules is the point.
“I would be much more concerned to be a fan of other sports that don’t have any doping cases,” said Brett Clothier, the Australian lawyer who leads the Athletics Integrity Unit, the body charged with catching track’s doping cheats. “Having no cases doesn’t mean no doping.”
To Mr. Clothier, then, a string of investigations and suspensions in a sport with a well-documented doping history is not a cause for concern but rather an inherent contradiction: To restore his sport’s reputation, he and his colleagues must first in the eyes of some besmirch it even more.
As a case involving positive tests for Chinese swimmers hangs over the Olympic pool, Mr. Clothier also has joined elite athletes and government investigators in publicly questioning whether the current global antidoping system can ever fully eradicate drug cheats. Each sport is left to arrange its own antidoping procedures.
Still, each new violation uncovered in track and field is, to him, proof that the sport is doing what many others are not: unapologetically pursuing elite athletes who might be taking banned substances, and providing a fairer platform for everyone.
“Our track record, first and foremost, indicates we have the means and commitment to actually uncover doping,” Mr. Clothier said in an interview in June. “If I was a fan of other sports, I would worry that not enough is happening.
“Let’s be clear: Most sports don’t do enough to uncover doping.”
A Legacy of Scandals
Track and field’s commitment to tackling doping was born out of scandal, and a golden plaque attached to a wall near the entrance of the unit’s offices in Monaco serves as a daily reminder of those dark times.
There, engraved in gold, is the name of Lamine Diack, the former president of track and field’s governing body. A Senegalese administrator who was for decades one of the most influential figures in sports, Mr. Diack and several other top track officials were accused of soliciting bribes from athletes who had been caught doping in exchange for covering up their positive results and allowing them to continue competing, including at the Olympics. Mr. Diack was convicted by a French court in 2020; he died a year later.
The scandal was so profound, and so damaging to track and field’s brand, that the sport’s leaders eventually changed the organization’s name and logo as they tried to distance it from the past. Those changes also led to the creation of the Athletics Integrity Unit, known as the A.I.U., and to a commitment to devote a higher percentage of the budget — about 12 percent annually, or roughly $12 million — of the rebranded governing body, World Athletics, to rooting out doping.
The level of independence enjoyed by the A.I.U. is rare in elite sports. While its offices sit two floors below those of track and field’s headquarters in a salmon-colored building in Monte Carlo, Mr. Clothier answers not to the current leader of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe, but to a separate board. That arrangement ensures that track’s current leaders hold little power over the antidoping body’s activities.
That structure has enabled Mr. Clothier and his second in command, Thomas Capdevielle, to build a rigorous and intelligence-driven testing system that the A.I.U. uses to locate and test athletes wherever they are in the world, sometimes at a moment’s notice.
The strategy starts at the top. A group of the top 10 athletes per discipline in both men’s and women’s categories is selected to be part of the World Athletics testing pool. Each athlete has a profile and a bespoke risk score from 1 to 10, calculated from a range of factors, including the athlete’s testing history, performances, nationality — there are athletes from 90 nations in the testing pool — and intelligence reports from testers in the field.
The higher the score, the higher the risk. A rank of red out of four color-coded categories signifies that, according to A.I.U. data, an athlete has a higher likelihood of doping. Those athletes are tested more often and placed under greater scrutiny.
But suspecting, or even being convinced, that an athlete is cheating is very different from catching a cheater. Long gone are the days, Mr. Clothier said, of huge amounts of banned substances lingering in the bloodstream. The window to catch athletes has now shrunk so much, he said, that the so-called washout period for some banned substances — the time when it disappears from an athlete’s system — is sometimes a few hours.
Greater sophistication among cheats and their entourages in microdosing, or taking tiny amounts of prohibited substances at regular intervals, during training periods can make catching them even more difficult. “It’s really become a game of cat and mouse,” Mr. Clothier said.
That is why the A.I.U. expends so much effort on preparation, intelligence and targeted out-of-competition testing, he said, rather than the blanket testing of athletes at regular intervals, as many other sports still do, or only at major events.
That rigorous approach can be exacting for track’s athletes. They have to update their whereabouts every day of the year while they are in the testing pool, and they provide a daily one-hour window when they are available to be tested. Even then, if a tester can track them down outside that time, they are obliged to provide samples.
Failure to be present or to provide a sample results in a “whereabouts failure.” Three of those in a calendar year result in a two-year suspension as part of strict rules in place to prevent evasion. To catch the right athlete at the right time for the right substances, whereabouts “is key,” Mr. Clothier said.
Still, two years is less than a possible longer exile if they are caught doping. That fact, he said, can lead athletes to make calculations about whether to answer a surprise knock on the door from an A.I.U. sample collector.
That was the conundrum the Nigerian sprinter and long jumper Blessing Okagbare faced when testers arrived at her home in Florida shortly before the last Olympics. Investigators had found text exchanges between Okagbare and Eric Lira, a Texas therapist, in which Okagbare appeared to tell Mr. Lira that she did not reply to a visit from testers because she was not sure it was “safe” to take a test.
Okagbare was eventually tracked down in Europe and gave a sample. When that came back positive for growth hormones, she was pulled from her events at the Tokyo Olympics and suspended. But her case was a vivid example of how even intelligence and strict rules aren’t foolproof: Okagbare already had two whereabouts failures when she finally submitted a test.
“If she was on one,” Mr. Clothier said of the failures, “then she probably doesn’t answer the door.”
Okagbare received a 10-year ban from competition and Mr. Lira a prison sentence for supplying her with the drugs.
The Stakes Rise
In an Olympic year, antidoping veterans know, cheating rises.
“This is a real, red-hot, crucial moment,” Mr. Capdevielle, the head of testing, said of the period before the Paris Olympics. The A.I.U. data proves it: The number of athletes in the red zone changes when they make frequent changes to their travel itineraries, which investigators said could be a sign of something nefarious.
To counter that, the agency constantly fine-tunes its matrix to ensure that the right athlete is tested at the right time and for the right substances. In its constant search for reliable testing partners, the A.I.U. favors the use of private companies over national antidoping bodies, which Mr. Clothier said could be slow to act and less interested in seeing their own athletes punished.
The A.I.U. has cited a run of recent cases — a sprinter from Suriname, a pole-vaulter from Brazil, a Kenyan distance runner — as proof that its targeted approach was succeeding. But Mr. Clothier admitted that could be an illusion: He knows that athletes in track and field, and other sports, are still cheating and getting away with it. That may be why he is unflinching in his criticism of the current global antidoping system.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that it’s working particularly well.”
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