Dubai: The World Anti-Doping Authority (Wada) has promised greater protection for clean athletes in an attempt to restore faith and fairplay across all disciplines.
Rob Koehler, who was appointed Wada’s Deputy Director General at the beginning of April, was in Dubai to facilitate a joint meeting between the Egypt Ministry of Sport, Egypt National Olympic Committee and the Egypt National Anti-Doping Organisation under the patronage of the UAE National Olympic Committee here on Saturday.
Koehler has been an integral member of Wada since 2002, and in his most recent role as Senior Director, Education and Nado/Rado relations, he was largely responsible for the advances made in initiating Regional Anti-Doping Organisations around the world that included development of anti-doping programmes in 16 regions spanning more than 127 countries.
“The Wada code is the ultimate and it is time the various governments all across the world realize this fact so that they may move in and even have criminal sanctions slapped on such cheats,” Koehler told Gulf News.
“Admitted that there are sports that have been tainted by banned substances, but governments and politicians must make a conscious effort to back all anti-doping activities and go all-out to protect the clean athletes in sport,” he suggested.
“This is a crucial time for sport all over the world and we need everyone’s support if we are to have cleaner sports for our future generations.”
Koehler was also responsible for the oversight of all national ant-doping organisations along with a global anti-doping education. “I admit we have not done that much in educating and preventing athletes from falling prey, be it to the coaches or the doctors or trainers. The history of anti-doping has evolved, and from my experience the next ought to prevention rather than catching and punishing the cheats. This needs to be a multi-pronged approach wherein the athletes will be empowered to make the right choice,” he suggested.
“It is a whole chain and we all need to work together. And one of the most important things that we need to do is cut off the supply chain of banned substances entering a country,” Koehler added.
Sporting powerhouse Egypt is a case in point as representatives from WADA have been consistently meeting up with Egyptian sports and anti-doping authorities to propel the progress of the country’s development of a National Anti-Doping Organisation (Nado). Since Egypt is one of the biggest sporting nations in the region, developing its own Nado is seen as the first major step to installing a robust anti-doping programme for the rest of the Arab world to follow.
“What’s happening now is that we are exposing more. Investigative journalism is bringing forward more details that we are digging into and we are finding out more. The main thing here is that sport is going to take these things more seriously. We need to tackle these and we need to make the change,” Koehler said.
