This was published 3 months ago
WADA makes drug testing changes after Bol ‘disaster’
Drug testers will alter how they test for the endurance drug EPO after a World Anti-Doping Agency review prompted by Australian Olympian Peter Bol’s case.
Bol was provisionally banned for seven months in 2023 after returning a positive, out-of-competition test for EPO. The ban was lifted when further analysis of his test results cleared the 800-metre runner.
Australian runner Peter Bol.Credit: Getty Images
The WADA review was not of Bol’s case specifically but explored the broader method of testing for EPO, which world scientific experts still criticise as being “subjective, old-fashioned and unsophisticated”.
The scientists said the approved WADA changes were an improvement but would not necessarily prevent another case such as Bol’s.
A WADA spokesman said the review found the overall analytical method for testing for EPO was still valid but recommended changes to how laboratories carried out the tests. One of those changes was to require double-checking of samples using other scientific methods if the first method detected a positive result.
The spokesman said these changes were to strengthen how tests were processed and reported and to improve “harmonisation of laboratory-related anti-doping rules and activities”.
Degradation of samples in EPO cases makes accurate detection of the synthetic drug difficult and some of the changes introduced by WADA have sought to address this.
Athletes Integrity Unit chairman David Howman, a former head of WADA, last year described the Bol case as “a disaster” for the athlete and the drug testers.
“The worst thing that could happen is what happened in that [Bol] case,” Howman said in Budapest on the day Bol ran at the world championships last year, after his provisional ban had been lifted.
“What we must do is to ensure that the process can be reviewed and re-conducted in a way that doesn’t end up in such a disaster. It’s not fair on the athlete. We accept that.”
Peter Bol was picked for the Olympic team for Paris after running second at the National Championships last weekCredit: Getty Images
The problem for testers in EPO cases is distinguishing between synthetic, or recombinant, EPO and EPO which is naturally produced in the body.
Bol’s lawyers and scientists argued the athlete had large amounts of naturally occurring EPO and drug testers had misread this natural EPO as synthetic. Bol’s samples were reported to be a “borderline” positive.
A group of Norwegian scientists, who were long-term critics of EPO testing methods, analysed the data in Bol’s case and raised doubts about the positive drug test before the ban was overturned.
A spokesman for the scientists, biochemist Jon Nissen-Meyer, told this masthead the new WADA changes were “somewhat improved”.
He said the changes would “to a greater extent than [the previous rules] recommend additional testing using other methods ... in cases of doubt. This is also an improvement, but it may not always help”.
The scientists argue better methods for testing for EPO – using mass spectrometers to analyse proteins – should be developed because the method the WADA review validated as effective was “old-fashioned and rather unsophisticated”.
Nissen-Meyer was uncertain if the changes would help prevent another case such as Bol’s.
“Perhaps in theory, but in practice?”
He said in Bol’s case, the Australian laboratories did use a second processing method to analyse the results and so followed the new rules.
“This enabled a more reliable interpretation of the results and revealed clearly that the A- and B-sample test results were completely identical and that they were both clearly negative for synthetic EPO.
“Thus, the Australian laboratory did in that respect a good job technically, but ironically the interpretation of the results done by the laboratory and the second opinion provided by … the WADA laboratory in Cologne was nevertheless completely wrong!”
The WADA changes were adopted at the most recent board meeting and will come into effect from June 15 this year.
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