Elite athletes’ duty to provide information on their whereabouts: Justifiable anti‐doping work or an indefensible surveillance regime?

Abstract

In this article we explain and reflect critically upon the athlete whereabouts reporting system in top-level sports initiated by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). This system makes it compulsory for athletes who are in a registered testing pool in their national and/or international federation to submit information about their whereabouts. In this way, athletes are required to be accessible for no advance notice doping tests all year round. If such information is not submitted, or if the information provided is incorrect and athletes cannot be found when a no advance notice test is supposed to be taken (a missed test), they may be given a warning. In most sports and national anti-doping regulations, three such warnings within 18 months may be regarded as a violation of the doping regulations and may lead to exclusion from sport for a period of between three months and two years. The system is controversial. In this article we will examine the key objections to the system and, more specifically, objections connected to ideas of justice and athletes' autonomy and right to selfdetermination. The argument will be a practical ethical one informed by a survey on attitudes towards the whereabouts system carried out among 236 athletes belonging to the registered testing pool in Norway. We conclude that if the basic principles of anti-doping work are 1 accepted, WADA's whereabouts system represents nothing other than an efficient extension of this work.

Australian athlete support personnel lived experience of anti-doping

“…Negative views focused on the reach of anti-doping into private lives, which is consistent with literature questioning the implications of anti-doping for freedom of movement and the presumption of innocence (Hanstad & Loland, 2009;Houlihan, 2004;Malloy & Zackus, 2002;Mazanov, 2013a The common mixed view saw value in the principle of Athlete Whereabouts to enable out-ofcompetition testing, while questioning its ability to treat athletes on an equitable basis. That is, while the principle was seen to be sound, ASP raised concerns over implementation; included in this was concern over sport club complicity to help athletes 'dodge' tests.…”

Surveillance and control in sport: a sociologist looks at the WADA whereabouts system

“…Implicit in much of the previous discussion is the issue of consent, which is also raised in the examination of the whereabouts system by Hanstad and Loland (2009). Hanstad and Loland were the first researchers systematically to document elite athletes' views of the WADA whereabouts system but, despite the fact that, as we have seen, they documented widespread criticism of the system by athletes, they nevertheless concluded that the system can be conditionally accepted as constituting justifiable anti-doping work.…”

A call for policy guidance on psychometric testing in doping control in sport

“…Page 5 of 40 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 4 argon) poses an increasing challenge to detection-based doping control, (3) the cost is prohibitively high at an average of 300 US dollars for each routine test, with specialist tests being much more costly (personal communication, Olivier Rabin, January 18, 2013) and (4) management of such a system is not only resource intensive and inconvenient (Elbe, Melzer & Brand, 2012) and inherently paradoxical (Pitsch, 2013), but mandating such a system is also an infringement on athletes" human rights (Hanstad & Loland, 2009). The question is then how can one pre-emptively prove non-guilt?…”