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During a visit to China in 2007, Dick Pound, chief of the World Anti-Doping Agency, was quoted in Chinese state-run media as saying the country's efforts to prevent drugs in sport were "a model to the world."
Liu Peng, head of China's State Administration of Sports and delegate to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party, was quoted last October saying his country "will strictly ban drugs in sports, and athletes involved in doping will be severely penalized."
Liu stated all provincial branches under his administration have signed anti-doping contracts with their athletes. The country opened a state-of-the-art lab and facilities for the Games last November and promised to have an anti-doping agency operating nationwide.
Guillaume Jeannet, a sports lawyer and former member of the French national rowing team who competed in the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, spoke on Monday in the Chinese capital on anti-doping policies that will be in place this August.
China has ratified into domestic legislation WADA's anti-doping code as part of its obligation entitling it to host the Olympic Games and has also established the China Anti-Doping Agency officially accredited by WADA, Jeannet said.
The 11-page code covers substances and methods prohibited at all times, as well as those not allowed during competitions and substances banned from specific sports. The International Olympic Committee issued its first list of substances banned from the Games in 1963. WADA, based in Montreal, Canada was created by the IOC in 1999 to coordinate the fight against drugs in sport. The agency works with individual world sporting federations to implement testing procedures.
According to Jeannet, China will be responsible for all tests conducted during the Olympics. "The Chinese agency will be under the control and supervision of both the IOC and WADA," he said. The IOC will organize and conduct one more test before the Games to ensure that China is ready and all the frameworks to fight doping are "finely tuned."
During the 15 days of the Summer Olympics, the Chinese agency "will be in operation 24/7, from the opening ceremony to the closing ceremony," he noted. There will be 41 doping stations to collect and analyze samples with an average of 230-240 tests done per day. Each of the top four athletes in every event will be tested as well as two competitors chosen at random.
WADA will have 20 independent observers in Beijing invited by the IOC having the right to monitor the Chinese Anti-Doping Agency and 41 anti-doping stations. They are entitled to look around and see how the controls are organized whether the Chinese are in compliance with code and will issue a report thereafter to say whether or not they think everything was correctly organized.
Jeannet said that among the 11,000 athletes expected to participate in the 2008 Games there will be approximately 4,500 tests conducted, both during 15-day event plus those immediately before and after the competition. Those will be handled by IOC and WADA members on a country-by-country basis.
"This is 25 percent more tests during the Athens Games in 2004 and 90 percent more than were conducted during the 2000 Sydney Games," he said.
When it comes to efforts to have drug-free athletes, "this will be the most controlled games ever," Jeannet added. "It is naïve to think there will be no cheaters and no doped athletes during the Olympics, but if this is implemented and all 4,500 tests held under the rules set up by WADA, it will probably be the cleanest games ever."
He said an interesting element to assess whether or not the Beijing Games will be clean, or at least cleaner compared to before, will be the number of positive tests. In the 1980 Moscow Games there were zero positive tests; in Athens one year after the implementation of the World Anti-Doping Code there were 24 positive tests.
Jeannet would not single out any country as a major doping nation, saying it varied by the specific type of event and there was "no single sport where doping is not a possibility." He noted cheating was now a problem involving individuals rather than government institutions as had been the case during the Cold War.
Concerns over cheating by Chinese institutions carried a "huge risk" as there will be independent monitoring. There has been a crackdown on regional sports schools for doping violations, Jeannet said.
Asked how trustworthy Chinese authorities will be, he responded "no less than those officials in the U.S., Russia, France or anywhere else."
