Blood and Urine Samples of Athletes to be Stored for Ten Years

LONDON: International anti-doping bodies will now make it mandatory for the blood and urine samples taken from athletes to be stored for 10 years in order to spot signs of doping. According to the current rules, samples are stored for eight years.

In a consensus statement to be announced on Thursday, players competing in the FIFA World Cup in Brazil this June will be among the first athletes to come under the new 'freeze and store' guidelines, which will offer opportunity to retrospectively analyse samples over the course of a sporting career and carry out regular biological profiling.

They will also announce that a wider use should be made of biological profiling - the athlete's 'biological passport' - which will show tiny changes made to the individual's unique genetic blueprint by doping substances and methods, without the need to identify the presence of the substance itself when regularly monitored.

These form part of a comprehensive set of recommendations agreed upon by 24 international bodies to implement the World Anti-Doping Code 2015.

These will be published on Thursday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and represent a sea-change in thinking about how to crack down on the increasingly sophisticated techniques used by some athletes to attempt to cheat their way to victory.

The signatories, who include representatives from FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and accredited anti-doping laboratories, had met in Zurich in November last year to come to a consensus on catching dope cheats. They say storing the samples for a decade will enable technology to catch up with substances that currently evade detection.

Professor Jiri Dvorak, FIFA chief medical officer, explained that the meeting was prompted by the realisation that scientific advances in performance-enhancing substances and the ingenuity of sports cheats were outpacing current anti-doping strategies. "The fight against doping has intensified over the past 10 to 15 years, but the increase in simple sampling procedures has not stopped some athletes from continuing to cheat," he says.

The organisations say that greater emphasis needs to put on deterrents and prevention, the regular gathering of forensic intelligence and collaboration between all the interested parties in sport, medicine, and science.

"The deterrent effect of delayed testing with newly devised analytical methods is substantial," says the consensus statement, which suggests that in future it should be possible to detect the way in which doping can leave a "molecular signature" on individual cells. FIFA started the biological passport initiative, explains Professor Dvorak, but it needs to be more widely applied.

It won't be cheap to begin with, he admits, but it will be much more effective in the long term. Other approaches agreed include tailoring the assessment of doping risk to the demands of the individual sport. For example, cyclists or cross country skiers are likely to choose different substances and methods to illicitly boost their performance than those (substances) preferred by weightlifters or wrestlers, says the statement.

Testing programmes also need to take account of the training periods of individual sports and the degree to which doping has become a normal part of the culture. This type of "intelligent testing" will yield more results. The statement says that all organsations have to take the lead on making it clear that doping isn't acceptable. They should "consistently emphasise that drug-taking is fundamentally contrary to the principles and precepts of sport - that is, against the spirit of the sport," the statement says.