Tennis: The Impact of a Biological Passport Program

By
at Internationaled.org

Published: March 7, 2013

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It has been announced that tennis will introduce a biological passport program to aid in the fight against drug cheats and doping in the sport.

The case for biological passports got a huge boost when, in admitting to having used performance enhancing drugs in his cycling career, American cyclist Lance Armstrong praised the technology by saying it "worked." 

World No. 2 Roger Federer led calls for its implementation, saying: "A blood passport will be necessary as some substances can't be discovered right now but might in the future, and that risk of discovery can chase cheaters away," and hints about when the passport would be introduced into tennis had suggested it would occur sometime this year, however the turnover has been surprising.

ITF president Francesco Ricci Bitti confirmed today's decision: "The implementation of the athlete biological passport is an important step in the evolution of the tennis anti-doping program as it provides us with a great tool in the fight against doping in our sport."

 

What is a biological passport?

Speaking to the BBC, Dr Michael Ashenden, who has acted as an expert witness in various high-profile doping cases, explained what a biological passport could do:

The passport is best suited as a monitoring tool, to help guide anti-doping authorities toward those athletes with suspicious results. In extreme cases, where the variations (from the riders' established norms) are quite radical, the evidence can support a doping violation on its own. But most times, results are either natural or suspicious, so the passport helps the testers focus on the suspicious ones.



 

The impact on tennis

Question marks over the adequacy of the drug-testing system as it was had been put up by players. Andy Murray recently lamented the preference of urine te...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Tennis

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