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Athletes undercover? Global and U.S. anti-doping agencies clash over tactics (Aug 7, Reuters)

The global and U.S. anti-doping agencies are at odds over undercover tactics used by the American body to try to catch drug cheats, Reuters has learned.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) says U.S. agency USADA broke the global code by letting several athletes it had caught between 2011 and 2014 violating drugs rules go undercover and keep on competing without prosecution in exchange for information on other violators.

USADA says the tactic is necessary and allowed, and wants to keep using it. WADA says it is against its code and that athletes caught breaking doping rules should not get to line up in races, potentially winning prize money and medals, without first being publicly prosecuted and sanctioned.

[...] The U.S. agency has defended letting drug rule violators compete so they could act as undercover informants, saying in one case such assistance had provided intelligence to a U.S. federal law enforcement investigation into a human and drug trafficking scheme.

So what's the money on US intelligence agencies using positive doping tests to blackmail these athletes into not only spying on rival teams, but sabotaging them as well?

Remember in 2021, when several athletes from the Chinese swimming team tested positive after eating contaminated food? The US and other Western media outlets of course reported on it as some fantastical lie by the Evil Chinese, but the WADA report agreed with the Chinese investigation, noting that all subsequent and prior test showed that no systematic doping could have been taking place among the tested Chinese athletes:

From the WADA report:

In early April 2021, CHINADA informed WADA that it had initiated an investigation, involving the public health authorities, into the source of TMZ found in the samples. There were strong indicators that these cases could be a case of group contamination considering the following factors:

• There were 23 swimmers, and 28 positive samples. All tested positive at the same time for TMZ at consistently very low levels (pg or low ng/mL range).
• The swimmers were from different regions of China, with different coaches and from different swimming clubs.
• The swimmers were in the same place at the same time when the positive samples arose.
• A number of these swimmers were tested on multiple occasions during the swim meet. Some of them were tested on two or even three occasions on consecutive days. For several swimmers, the results varied from negative to positive within a few hours, which is not compatible with a doping scenario of deliberate ingestion nor with micro-dosing.
• Some of the competing swimmers stayed in at least one other hotel. Three of those athletes were tested and none tested positive for TMZ.

It also goes into details about how hard USADA were pushing for a further investigation, disputing both CHINADA and WADA's findings without providing any counter evidence. Really, the whole thing is very 👀