2013 WADA drug testing

Saw this from other sports performance discussions...chart below shows the relative no. of WADA drug tests carried out across various sports in 2013.

Thought I'd share for information & comment.

I don't really know what to make of it.  One possible thought is - "well, not much testing in tennis for such a high profile sport".  But, on the other hand, there are not that many tennis players to test - what maybe 200 on men's/women's side each that really matter?  Maybe even fewer than that.  Many other sports will have many more athletes that can be competitive at least in some disciplines, and thus more critical to test.

One sport that really struck me as low is football.  There is an awful lot of money there, as well as an awful lot of players playing at a highly competitive level - yet relatively few tests.  One could argue that football should really cover well over 50% of the pie.

Thought someone would post this up. I've been arguing with people over this for quite a while

it's difficult to actually make anything out of this, tbh. Boxing has a much larger share of WADA tests than tennis because there are 17 divisions, four major belts, and umpteen interim/intercontinental titles. A fighter gets tested after every fight, and even with only one test in a training camp - that's about four fights a weekend, eight tests a weekend - eight per training camp cycle (assuming all fighters in the camp were tested once) - so sixteen tests carried out, per fight promotion, two promotions a week (minimum) fifty weeks a year. and it has a minute piece of the pie. There are what? four hundred people who play tennis at a high enough level to justify the expense of consistently testing them? No surprise tennis has a much smaller cut of the pie than athletics. Cycling has a "history"... The chart in and of itself is a random accumulation of data, I'd need to see relative data - how the Tests carried out vs players participating graph looks. How the how many tests the average player submits in relation to their rankings... Blood test vs Urine tests etc.

Surprised footballers have such a free ride, though... average premier league has 500 players, and it's huge in every country.


Cricket isn't even in that chart and no one thinks it has a doping problem (because it doesn't, all the test, d-bol and HGH in the world aren't going to make you bowl faster, or make it swing).

Don't agree KR re cricket.
PEDS can be used in pretty much all sports, including cricket.

Cheesecake would be a better investment, quite honestly.

Please don;t mention cheesecake it gives me wood.

Why have players took peds then?

It is a good illustrating graph, but statistically its got a problem that it only gives relative figures, and not numbers. All the athletics sports were always gonna have the biggest slices of the cheesecake as theyre the flashpoints. Those high numbers may make tennis in relation look smaller than it is. Being said i DO want more WADA tests for peace of mind. If we could get the numbers perhaps

It's quite simple LS - the only thing which PEDs could help cricketers is recovery. but unless you're on a particular role, that's not really a problem. mental conditioning is much more important. thus you're better off taking something that makes you happy, like cheesecake.

Drugs in sport are never simple.
What proof do you have of this to back up your skepticism?
People have taken peds in cricket for a reason. They obvs think it will aid their performance.
Why are they wrong for thinking that?
I think it would be more prevalent in t20, closest ting to baseball and that is a joke for peds.

Surely PEDs could help cricketers bowl faster and hit the ball further? As LS says, like baseball, it seems a sport where PEDs could be a big help.

Cricketers have more important things to thing about - like spot-betting   

Cricket fit really isn't the same as fit fit. Shoaib Akthar, can't walk fifty metres without a knee popping up. Fastest bowler in the world. Zaheer Khan mad Yuvraj Singh went to the South of France lost 10kgs and got really fit... looking at their performance post return, they may as well have eaten cheesecake! I'm not dismissing the presence of steroids in the sport - they just don't help, unless you have severe stamina issues.

Bowling fast in cricket is a mechanics issue, raw power doesn't help much... Makhaya Ntini looks like a tank (the gym bunny tanks, not Andy Murray) now, but he can barely get the speedometer past 130ks now. Then there's the fact that even if you can bowl fast... It's kind of a "good for you" situation... Unless youre making the ball do something at that pace....

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u6QlCLVuRQ&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D5u6QlCLVuRQ

Regarding the batting side of the game... one would think PED's would help, especially with the advent of t20... but again, mainly mechanics. I've got 15" arms, in the gym five days a week, and no one considers me a big hitter, but I can clear the boundary ropes if it hits the sweet spot because I use pro level bats, with the weight compacted at the bottom.

Thinking about it... it must be quite funny to see me at 6" weighing 90kgs pythons for arms, taking a spinners run-up.

When i did my disso, I found some stuff on drugs in cricket.
Anshuman Gaekwad (former coach of India) said Steroid, amphetamine and cortisone injections were common.
Many would also take stimulants he said during drinks break, to perk concentration wise.
I think he has a great point especially with that one.

I just feel every sport can benefit from peds as there are such a vast array of aspects of the body you can improve.

Cortisone injections are legal last time I checked, LS.

Even Coffee helps people concentrate, we should not take extreme positions.

Watching Imran Khan, Lily, Thomson, Roberts, Marshall and others bowl at Gavaskar, unless your hand-eye coordination can be improved, not much use for PEDs, IMO.

The chart would benefit from annotating down actual number athletes and total tests. Is there raw data for this pie chart, Lydian or a link to it? Thanks for posting it.

Apologies the chart is 2012, 2013 data isn't available yet.

Here are the actual number of tests carried out per sport.

Good spot, I did think taht was off.
But the other stuff?
There have been a fair few who have been banned for ped use. I think its more prevalent than we think imo.

This chart is VERY interesting.

The % of tests in each sport conducted by that Sports governing body (or in the case of boxing bodies). This is incredibly telling. For example, more than 40% of cyclings tests are conducted by the UCI. There is no way, that any sport, should have the bulk of its testing conducted by the body responsible for promoting the sport. That is a clear conflict of interest. In tennis the figure is over 60% - the highest of any sport.

Exactly Lydian and why do they do that?
To protect their greatest assets when they know that a drugs scandal will cause anarchy in the sport like nothing else?

Cricket is a skills based sport so imo it deffo is less clear cut than cycling or athletics for instance, but I still think it happens.
I could be wrong but I bet they do most of their testing out of competition and not during. Masking agents perhaps...

Don't disagree LS. Whether that means people are abusing the system is another matter though...

Here's the full data set for the first chart I posted:

summerblues wrote:
One sport that really struck me as low is football.  There is an awful lot of money there, as well as an awful lot of players playing at a highly competitive level - yet relatively few tests.  One could argue that football should really cover well over 50% of the pie.

Very true.
Obviously people here will look at tennis here and then see the main pie takers, but football, the biggest sport in the world and perhaps the wealthiest, should be doing so much more testing.
Cycling has a minuscule budget compared to footy but look at that contrast, stark as the Arctic and the Sahara.
Blatter (don;'t get me started on that cretin) just callously dismisses the very notion of drugs in footy despite the whole puerto (barca & real) list.

Just to reveal more detail behind the tennis 60% figure above...it's actually 62.9% of tests conducted by the ITF...

74 for tennis - is that the number for the 37-ish% that aren't done by the governing body?

LS - your only talking about legal drugs... and caffeine. I've never seen a cricketer improve their raw data... ever. A guy like Mitchell Johnson can improve his accuracy overnight, but I've never seen any cricketer go from 130kph to 145kph, ever. Nor have I seen a small hitter start clearing the stadium.. To hit big you need timing - you can hit the gym inject that there d-bol, put sand on it, water it and leave it in the sun - they'll all help you equally.
Lydian - Can't really Bigify the picture from my mobile, so I'll wait till I'm home to debate the raw information.

That's just 74 blood tests JHM, the rest are urine.

Steroids and amphetamines are legal?

All the data is here BTW: http://www.wada-ama.org/Documents/Resources/Testing-Figures/WADA-2012-Anti-Doping-Testing-Figures-Report-EN.pdf

Good point summer - I also touched on the fact that football has a worryingly small proportion of the circle. There are more pro footballers in England (92 pro clubs - 25 men squads = 1850 players) than there are serious tennis players!

lydian wrote:That's just 74 blood tests JHM, the rest are urine.

That's amazingly small - less than for bobsleigh and only 2 more than Modern Pentathlon. How many modern pentathletes are there compared to tennis?

Football & tennis similarly...huge amounts of money involved in both (relative to the number of pro players).

Indeed JHM

Read your post wrong, LS -my mistake, for some reason only Cortisol injections... Sourav Ganguly once said the only time he went to the gym as a pro was in 1996, to see how it looked. Have trouble buying that players who thought fitness was a pub crawl... took steroids and amphetamines... Imagine a kid who isn't planning on showing up for a test getting cheat sheets... You need to train for steroids to help you... and it's interesting to note Anshuman Gaekwad threatened legal action on the magazine which published his claims - "I generally talked about energy-replacement drinks which, in any case, are taken on the field in full public view," an angry Gaekwad told the AFP news agency. "At no point did I mention the use of performance- enhancing drugs. At one point in the interview, they have rightly quoted me as saying the players have become health conscious."

my issue with the PED witchhunt is on full display with that statement. because the burden of proof lies with the accused statements which may have been misquoted is enough to ascertain that an entire sport is dirty, please.

I don't think its the entire sport, I just think with the very low testing numbers, the cases of athletes taking drugs that have been caught, makes me think it's more prevalent then they are letting on.

then address the matter of your "star witness" more or less stating that the story that was attributed to him was a fabrication. I'm not saying for a second that cricket is clean, as cricketers are a mildly cooked bunch, and they'd
take laxatives all midnight if they thought it would help then perform better, and towards the end of his career, I'm of the opinion that Akthar was being held together by more than just sticker tape and Allah. But that's different from using a falsely attributed quote to suggest steroids which are as helpful as cheesecake, really, when you don't hit the gym, are prevalent.

That was the first one I can remember off the top of my head, I had other info.
I said when I did my disso I did some research on this, he was the first that came to mind. I did used to play cricket so I have a passion for it.
I am not on an anti cricket crusade KR.

Thing Is LS - I have no problem with someone stating steroids/drug abuse happens in cricket. I don't think they help at all (other than recovery, but as stated, your fitness levels need to be really low to suffer from physical cricketing fatigue), but as you would know, it doesn't have to actually help for people to think it helps. My issue is that I just can't see what you'd improve taking PED. I read somewhere that nandrolone can add a bit of pace which is funny, because of the two big cricketers caught taking Nandrolone - one actually got slower in the time period.... Shane Warne tested positive to a diuretic, which, fair enough, could possibly have hidden a more sinister PED... but what PED keeps a fat man fat, and his performances flat? Cricket does have failed tests, contrary to popular belief, but they are all (without fail) so comical, that it's tough to see any real benefit. Could be ignorance on my part, I admit But I actually played cricket in high school with two kids who were on steroids (anabolic), neither did it to get better at cricket, and neither actually got better at cricket... didn't even get that muscled, just look like semi-whales. Gotta keep to the processes, eat right, and save the £200 on d-bolt and Testosterone, and buy yourself a quality bat and some coaching lessons, kids.

LuvSports! wrote:That was the first one I can remember off the top of my head, I had other info.
I said when I did my disso I did some research on this, he was the first that came to mind. I did used to play cricket so I have a passion for it.
I am not on an anti cricket crusade KR.

Main thing is - I'm a level 2 qualified cricket coach, who lifts weights as a hobby. I know plenty people on steroids who play the game (recreationally, hence I don't count them when I say cricket doesn't have a roid problem - It'd be like using gated community housewives to say tennis has a alcoholism problem), Can't think of one who is a better player now, than before they started juicing. Closest is a certain current pro who liked hitting some reefer, won't say his name as he's going to be a superstar, and I don't think marijuana is a PED, anymore than Xanax is. Point of the story is that, barring concrete pro player proof, I can only go by what I've seen, which is that pro cricketers are tattle-tales (no honor amongst thieves in this sport), and that I've never seen PED s help any of the idiots I know during their last push in this sport.

Starting from the era of "Tenez" , Bog Brush, Amritea and Lydian [I have posted some Agassi controversy in the past too] we have seen some great articles in this particular topic, the chart shows there is a big underlying activities in Tennis, but will the ATP ever come forward to admit whats going behind scenes? and the measures to curb it?

All we see is some mediocre top 100 players getting suspended and banned, Gasquet was the only exception in the top 10 of the recent case but he was covered too with the excuse of lip smooch as the reason   

All I see is world has become fake, everything is fake these days, but in the midst of fake there are some genuine players and genuine reasons for the sport to be alive, yea they may not be winning nothing, not sure whether to call them dumb or smart.

Genuinely I believe 99% of all current players are involved atleast 1% in it , "be as a Roman in Rome", so may be we have to move on that ATP is not potent enough to take action against big names if found, and there never gonna be a convincing proof.

Table F13 - EPO by Testing Authority is very interesting. Russians are crazy.

Table F13 - Page 1
Table F13 - Page 2
Table F13 - Page 3