13% of British athletes admit to doping, new study finds
In 2022, academics working on behalf of UK Anti-Doping approached a sample of national and international British athletes about their drug use in the previous twelve months.
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13% of British athletes, across 50 sports, admitted to doping as part of a UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) study conducted during the Paris 2024 Olympic cycle, Honest Sport reports for the first time.
A leading academic, who has previously called on anti-doping agencies to establish the true prevalence of doping in sport, says that the findings underline just how ineffective the global anti-doping system is at catching cheats.
UKAD says that more athlete responses are needed before the full extent of doping in the UK can be estimated.
In 2011, as part of a similar study, 43% of athletes at the 2011 World Athletics Championships were estimated to have admitted to doping in the twelve months prior to the event. However, the publication of those results was famously delayed, and the authors of the study assumed that World Athletics was afraid to reveal the true extent of doping across the sport.
UKAD, on the other hand, openly published the results of its 2022 study at a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) symposium in March this year, and by press release, but the results have yet to be reported on by the international media.
In 2022, academics from the University of Utrecht, and Kingston University, approached approximately 800 British athletes to understand the prevalence of doping across the United Kingdom. 42% of the athletes who participated competed at international level, across around 50 sports.
The study was conducted at the request of UKAD, and by using the “WADA Prevalence Survey trial”.
The athletes were contacted either by email, or in-person by data collectors. They were asked if they would like to complete an anonymous questionnaire, as part of which they may later be asked if they had engaged in doping.
The survey also included questions on the use of nutritional supplements, and prescription medicines.
“Question 4: I have intentionally used a prohibited substance or method without a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) in the last 12 months,” read one of the Yes or No questions.
The questionnaire was designed to hide the respondents’ identities. The full methodology was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in February 2024.
A remarkable 13% of the British athletes admitted to doping, according to the study’s estimates. The 95% interval lay between 7 and 19% meaning that the academics could be 95% confident that the estimated prevalence of doping in the study was between those two percentages. Therefore, as many as 19% of the study participants could have admitted to doping.
In order to hide the respondents’ identities, the academics employed an indirect estimation approach which means that they cannot know the exact number of athletes who admitted to doping. Instead they arrive at an accurate estimation.
To put the alarming numbers in context, approximately 104 British athletes (13% of the 800 person sample) admitted to doping during the study, however UKAD only sanctions, on average, 21 athletes a year for testing positive (2013-2020).
In fact, UKAD collected 8023 doping samples in 2022 but only 0.4% of them led to positive drug tests, also known as adverse analytical findings (AAF).
When Honest Sport showed these findings to Roger Pielke Jr., a leading US academic who published an editorial on the prevalence of doping in the Springer journal in 2018, he said that generally far too many athletes are getting away with doping.
“Taking these numbers at face value and comparing them to athletes sanctions for doping would suggest that for every doper who is caught, 10-20 or more are not. With those odds, of course athletes looking for an edge might decide that the risks are worth it,” said Pielke Jr.
“The fact that greater than 10% of athletes break anti-doping rules means that every time you watch an event with multiple participants you are almost certainly watching someone who is doping.”
However, UKAD asserts that more data is needed before an accurate picture of doping in the UK can be fully estimated.
“But for future prevalence-related endeavours in the UK, we will need significantly more responses to strengthen the robustness of findings, and work closely with more sports organisations to increase visibility,” said UKAD’s Head of Insight and Innovation, and member of WADA’s Prevalence Working Group, Sam Pool.
The agency also said that it would develop the tool further to provide more targeted education and deterrence.
It must be said that UKAD has a near-identical ‘catch rate’ to all other anti-doping agencies and that the findings of the study are more damning for the global anti-doping system as a whole, rather than UKAD.
However, the study raises obvious concerns that doping in the UK is more endemic than previously known.
In 2011, academics at the University of Tübingen in Germany approached hundreds of international athletes competing at the 2011 World Athletics Championships in Daegu, South Korea, and estimated that 43% of them confessed to doping in the previous twelve months.
It was reported that World Athletics sought to suppress the results of the study but Lord Sebastian Coe, the governing body’s president, told a British parliamentary committee that the federation first needed to assess the adopted methodology before agreeing to its release.
The same parliamentary committee later released a report criticising the actions of World Athletics.
“We find the IAAF’s (World Athletics) stated reasons for blocking publication of the study to be unconvincing. We are concerned that their behaviour indicates a lack of transparency and, worse, an apparent desire to suppress revelations about doping in sport,” read the report.
UKAD, however, has taken a different approach and, earlier this year, reported its findings at a WADA symposium. The agency states that it is its intention to roll the questionnaire out to more athletes across the UK.
When Honest Sport asked Roger Pielke Jr. why attempts have not been made, by all anti-doping agencies, to establish the prevalence of doping across all sports, and all countries, his response was telling.
“Maybe we really just don't want to know.”
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