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Q&A: Former president of the World Anti-Doping Agency on 2016 Olympics, doping

Richard Pound is the founder and former president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). He served as WADA president from 1999-2007 and is a former vice president of the International Olympics Committee (IOC). He currently serves as chairman of the board of Olympic Broadcasting Services.

The Daily Orange spoke with Pound about this summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the impacts of doping and the future of overseeing banned substances in sports.

The Daily Orange: Brazil is facing economic problems, corruption, polluted water and the Zika virus. Will the venues be ready?

Richard Pound: Probably, yes. I think they’re going to cut back a lot on the expense and whatever frills there may have been. What I hope they don’t do is cut into the competitive facility so it has an adverse impact on the competition. But it will be last-minute. Fingers crossed.

The D.O.: How does WADA oversee all the world’s athletes?



R.P.: With difficulty, as you can imagine. There are a lot of countries in the world and a lot of the big sport powers are pretty inaccessible. Places such as Russia, Morocco and China are all very hard to get at. You end up having to trust their national anti-doping organizations, but you’re not sure whether you can.

Part of the difficulty is that WADA was never really designed as a primary testing agency. We do 3,000 or 4,000 tests a year, but there are probably 100,000 tests performed by other organizations every year. That’s done by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and UK Anti-Doping. You depend on them to be independent.

It’s an endless game of cat and mouse. The perpetrators always have the advantage because they know what they’re going to take and when they’re going to take it. It’s up to the enforcers to figure that out and devise a test.

The D.O.: In March, tennis star Maria Sharapova was provisionally suspended for testing positive for meldonium, which aids blood flow. Then a whole slew of tennis players were found to have also taken it. What happened there?

R.B.: It’s very clear meldonium was used in a certain parts of the world pretty regularly. It wasn’t because they all had heart conditions. I never understood Sharapova’s explanation, which was, “Well there’s some diabetes in the family and I used to get sick a lot.” What was she thinking? Here she is with a 30 million per year sole enterprise that depends on her being able to swing a tennis racket in competition.

The D.O.: Does the Olympics’ location, say South America versus Asia, have any effect on how much athletes dope?

R.P.: I don’t think so, no. Most of these athletes train at home. Many countries make sure that they’re clean — that their athletes are clean before they leave for the games.

The D.O.: Where do you see the future of overseeing doping?

R.P.: I think eventually with the leaders in the sport organizations, the penny is going to drop. If everybody thinks all the athletes are doping, that means the competitions are fixed. And nobody wants to watch something that’s fixed. The audience would drop. Sponsors would figure out they’re not reaching the same number of people they thought they were for their sponsorship fees. Broadcasters would say, “Why am I spending money for rights fees on something where the audience is shrinking?” The sport leaders would have to say, “Hey, we’ve got to fix this, now.”

Then, if people start to go off competing in orienteering, or to the theater or the arts, or canoeing with the kids in the summer instead of competing in sport, we have a big problem.





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