Asha De Fre­itas-Mose­ley

Ear­li­er this week, I sat in on a pre­sen­ta­tion held by of­fi­cers of the World An­ti-Dop­ing As­so­ci­a­tion, oth­er­wise re­ferred to as WA­DA.

It was a very in­for­ma­tive pre­sen­ta­tion, and I was able to get caught up on some of the lat­est de­vel­op­ments in the world of an­ti-dop­ing. Mem­bers of the au­di­ence be­came ac­quaint­ed with what WA­DA is about, built aware­ness of some of the more com­mon­place banned sub­stances and un­der­stand what was gen­er­al­ly ex­pect­ed of them.

The mea­sures tak­en to con­trol dop­ing in sports have be­come in­creas­ing­ly strin­gent over the years and in light of re­cent news sur­round­ing the Ja­maican ath­letes, once gods and god­dess­es of the track and whose rep­u­ta­tions are now taint­ed, it is like­ly that the aware­ness for WA­DA and dop­ing penal­ties will be­come a more reg­u­lar­ly ad­dressed top­ic amongst our ath­letes in this re­gion.

The two of­fi­cers who pre­sent­ed have done what they call "mis­sions" at some of the big­ger tour­na­ments held in the world. They re­ferred to ex­pe­ri­ences as re­cent as the Lon­don Olympics last year and through their ac­counts it be­came clear that WA­DA is an au­thor­i­ty in sport that must be and will be re­spect­ed..

It is easy to want to ar­gue against the in­va­sion of pri­va­cy ex­pe­ri­enced in var­i­ous ways by the poli­cies of WA­DA such as hav­ing to be watched while pro­duc­ing the pee sam­ple (yes, the male or fe­male must pro­vide an un­ob­struct­ed view of them­selves while pro­duc­ing their pee sam­ple), or the overkill of hav­ing to be chap­er­oned every­where for every sec­ond should an ath­lete not be able to im­me­di­ate­ly do the drug test when no­ti­fied of their se­lec­tion. In ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al tour­na­ments it is re­quired that the first four to place must do a drug test so that me­dia con­fer­ences and oth­er press­ing com­mit­ments have been known to cause test­ing de­lays in which case the role of the chap­er­one be­comes nec­es­sary.

Through the pre­sen­ta­tion, two things be­came abun­dant­ly clear. The first was that any ath­lete found with per­for­mance-en­hanc­ing drugs in their sys­tem will face se­vere con­se­quences and just like any oth­er law, ig­no­rance is no ex­cuse. The blame be­gins and ends with the ath­lete so that the onus lies on the ath­lete to al­ways know what is be­ing al­lowed in­to their sys­tem.

The sec­ond mes­sage that came through was that any­one as­pir­ing to be an elite ath­lete must be ready to ac­cept the in­con­ve­niences that come with it. Thanks to the blind­ing de­sire of many ath­letes in the past to win the gold medal, there is no room for trust and dis­cre­tion when it comes to drug test­ing. Li­ais­ing close­ly with med­ical per­son­nel who make it their du­ty to stay cur­rent with what WA­DA is do­ing is a great in­vest­ment of an ath­lete's time. Ed­u­cat­ing one­self on your rights through­out the sam­pling process is al­so a huge­ly ben­e­fi­cial proac­tive step. The as­pir­ing elite ath­lete must un­der­stand and ac­cept that, like it or not, WA­DA poli­cies are part of earn­ing and keep­ing that gold medal or any medal or plac­ing up to fourth place.

The lifestyle of the elite ath­lete can be af­fect­ed in many ways. For in­stance, ath­letes reg­is­tered for the test­ing pool must fol­low their "where­abouts" fil­ing oblig­a­tion, This in­volves sub­mit­ting a 60 minute time slot each day be­tween 6am and 11pm in­di­cat­ing where they can be found for an en­tire year. While there are op­por­tu­ni­ties to have this in­for­ma­tion up­dat­ed, the im­por­tant thing to note here is that a cer­tain amount of pri­va­cy is sur­ren­dered but this sort of pro­to­col has be­come deemed nec­es­sary.

An­oth­er area of lifestyle that can some­times af­fect our younger elite ath­letes in par­tic­u­lar in­volves mar­i­jua­na as is quite cul­tur­al­ly com­mon­place in the Caribbean. Just as sec­ond-hand cig­a­rette smoke has been proven to af­fect hu­mans just by in­hala­tion, the mar­i­jua­na smoke once in­haled can cause an ath­lete to test pos­i­tive in a drug test by WA­DA. As such, an as­pir­ing elite ath­lete needs to have the dis­ci­pline to act re­spon­si­bly once they re­alise their en­vi­ron­ment has changed to in­clude such ac­tiv­i­ty as can hap­pen in a va­ri­ety of ways and set­tings more­so in is­land life.

With great re­ward al­ways comes great re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. To ex­pect oth­er­wise is to show your un­suit­abil­i­ty to be con­sid­ered an elite ath­lete. There are a great many re­spon­si­bil­i­ties that ac­com­pa­ny the glam and glo­ry of ath­let­ic star­dom and recog­nis­ing the re­quire­ments as man­dat­ed by WA­DA are in no way the least of them. As a mat­ter of fact, break­ing any of their man­dates can mean los­ing every­thing else that was sac­ri­ficed on the way there.

Asha De Fre­itas-Mose­ley is a cer­ti­fied ath­let­ic train­er with the Na­tion­al Ath­let­ic Train­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion of the USA. She has over ten years of ex­pe­ri­ence re­ha­bil­i­tat­ing ath­letes and mem­bers of the ac­tive pop­u­la­tion from in­jury to full play. She can be reached at Pulse Per­for­mance Ltd., lo­cat­ed at #17 Hen­ry Pierre St, St. James. Tel: 221-2437.

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