Anti-Doping agency lost track of open cases and test results before Olympics

Just weeks before this summer’s Olympics in Paris, officials at the headquarters of the World Anti-Doping Agency got some startling news.

Lawyers for the organization told a meeting of top officials in late May that a series of problems with its databases had led to corrupted, missing or incorrect data related to at least 2,000 cases, and as a result, the agency had even lost track of more than 900 test results from athletes who had been accused of breaking anti-doping rules.

That stunning revelation came with another unsettling disclosure: Because of the data problems, the agency could no longer determine which cases it should be monitoring, and its lawyers were now unsure if its staff was properly tracking cases of athletes who might soon be heading to Paris.

“The more we dig,” the lawyers admitted in a PowerPoint presentation used at the meeting, “the more we find.”

The previously undisclosed account of the meeting raises serious new questions about the performance of the agency, known as WADA, which has come under intense scrutiny this year for its handling of possible doping in swimming.

The scale of the data problems deepened concerns inside the organization about its capacity to stay on top of its expanding workload.

Some officials, including several lawyers, were alarmed about the possibility that the shortcomings in the agency’s system could have allowed athletes who were under investigation for doping to slip through its net and participate in the Olympics. And hanging over the episode was fear that it could provide more ammunition to outside critics who say that WADA is failing in its core mission of policing the use of banned performance-enhancing substances in global sports.

Until now, knowledge of the vast number of cases affected by the data problems has been a closely guarded secret, limited to the handful of WADA officials directly involved in addressing the crisis. Senior leaders have kept many of the important details from the world’s athletes, the public and even members of the agency’s executive board, a group made up of sports officials and representatives of public bodies from around the world.

This article is based on photographs, obtained by The New York Times, of the PowerPoint presentation used at the meeting at the agency’s headquarters in Montreal and interviews with a former top anti-doping official and a current anti-doping official. The two officials were both briefed on how WADA discovered the problems but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a matter that was supposed to remain confidential.

WADA confirmed the meeting in May, the existence of the PowerPoint and that there were problems with “missing” data. But the organization played down the significance of the problem and the degree of alarm inside the agency, saying that the meeting was held “to discuss some temporary technical issues” that were quickly resolved.

The information on open cases, the agency said, was not missing; instead, it had just become “more labor-intensive” for its lawyers to gain access to it after a data migration marred by “technical challenges.”

In the months since the meeting in May, WADA said, “extensive work was carried out by the IT department to remedy the situation, making it now more efficient and effective for legal to review cases.” The agency said it was able to track the cases by using a combination of other databases.

Asked whether it could guarantee that no athletes who faced doping accusations slipped through and competed at the Olympics, WADA said it was able to adequately review all athletes.

Despite confirming a presentation by its exhausted staff raising alarms about a “dire situation” that needed resolving in only a matter of weeks, the agency said the technical problem had “no negative impact whatsoever on the Paris 2024 Olympic or Paralympic Games.”

The former anti-doping official briefed on how WADA confronted the problem disputed that contention, telling the Times that the database issues remained unresolved when the Games began.

And the official said WADA’s response that it was just “more labor-intensive” for the lawyers was disingenuous. There is so much data for the lawyers to go through, the official said, that tracking even a single case became an extraordinarily time-consuming endeavor.

The PowerPoint also demonstrated how the lawyers believed the task of getting their arms around mislabeled and corrupted data was overwhelming the agency’s staff. One slide said, “Impossible to do our job properly.” Another said, “Significant resources required for basic, non-reliable data.” And another added that “legal started to address the issue, but a lot of work remains to be done.”

WADA declined to say if its two most senior officials, its president and secretary-general, were briefed on the problem.

Johannes Herber, the head of Athleten Deutschland, an independent association that represents elite German athletes, said the suggestion that the global anti-doping authority had lost track of cases and test results was “absolutely shocking” and reinforced “the image of WADA as an organization unfit to get the job done.”

The agency, Herber said, must act quickly to disclose what happened and hold those responsible accountable.

“High standards of excellence and integrity are expected of athletes, and we expect the same from the organizations that set the framework for elite sport,” Herber said. If WADA officials “knowingly ran the risk of cheats competing in Paris,” he added, “we expect a serious response from the Olympic movement and the public authorities in the foundation board.”

Under the system that governs the world’s top athletes, national anti-doping agencies and sports federations are responsible for carrying out most anti-doping functions. WADA, in turn, oversees those organizations. If any country or federation fails to properly discipline an athlete under mutually agreed rules known as the World Anti-Doping Code, WADA’s job is to step in and appeal the ruling.

The mission can be extremely complex. Tens of thousands of athletes from scores of countries compete in dozens of sports that follow the WADA code. In 2022, for example, more than 250,000 doping tests were administered to international athletes. The result of each test must be entered into a global database monitored by WADA.

The rate of positives is quite low: often less than 1%. But given the vast scale of global testing, there are still 1,000 to 1,500 positive results every year. Each one becomes a case that requires follow-up and potential discipline.

WADA has had regular issues with its computer systems since its creation 2 1/2 decades ago. But the situation became particularly acute in the past year as its lawyers and technology department realized that a problem with a new internal database was affecting more and more cases, according to the two officials and the PowerPoint.

For WADA, the timing could hardly have been worse. The small group of executives, lawyers and information technology specialists who met to discuss the matter in May did so a month after the Times reported that the agency and Chinese anti-doping authorities had declined to discipline nearly two dozen elite Chinese swimmers who had tested positive for a banned heart drug.

In that case, both the agency and its Chinese counterpart violated WADA rules by keeping the decision from the public.

That disclosure had athletes and global anti-doping officials loudly questioning whether WADA could be trusted to ensure a level playing field in global sports. And by keeping the growing data crisis a secret, agency leaders were warned by their own employees, the organization was risking its reputation and credibility.

While WADA said it was inaccurate to say there was a crisis, the PowerPoint presentation and an account of what occurred in the meeting and inside the agency at the time painted a different picture.

The May 23 briefing was the second by the legal department on the issue this year and came only two months before the Paris Games. Besides the agency lawyers who had requested it, the meeting in May was attended by members of WADA’s technology team and at least two of the agency’s most senior executives.

The executives were led through the PowerPoint presentation, which described the database problem as a long-standing one that had deeply frustrated the legal department but that had now spiraled out of control. The problem was described as a “dire situation” that was an “emergency,” according to the slides. There was, according to one bullet point, an “urgent need for action.”

The scale of the crisis was far worse than the executives could have imagined, according to the officials. More than 900 testing results that showed the presence of a banned substance were not showing up in the agency database used to monitor cases. More than 1,700 cases had partial information and were missing codes linking them to samples submitted by individual athletes. Another 750 did not have enough information to connect them to a particular athlete at all.

By then, about 4,000 cases were open, a number that the presentation noted was “ballooning.” One slide showed an image of dominoes falling on one another. The problem was then so widespread that the lawyers made a plea for more resources to work through the data.

That sort of backlog, when it was described to others working in the anti-doping movement, raised significant concerns.

“It creates such a huge problem of delivery at the standard everybody is expecting,” said Michele Verroken, a former director of ethics and anti-doping at U.K. Sport, a government body that finances Olympic sports programs in Britain. “It will affect confidence because some athletes will be processed in the way they should be, and some may not be.”

To keep track of open cases, WADA relies on two databases. All major data about testing is housed in a worldwide repository called the Anti-Doping Administration & Management System, more commonly known as ADAMS. ADAMS is a constantly updated database accessible to athletes, sports federations, laboratories and anti-doping agencies.

But WADA also has its own internal system — known as the Results Management Center — that pulls information from ADAMS about violations so agency lawyers can monitor the details of specific cases.

In an attempt to improve the oversight system, members of WADA’s technology department generated a new database in 2023 that would pull the most critical data from ADAMS into the Results Management Center. But when the information was transferred, the updated database became overwhelmed.

The result was administrative and legal chaos. Cases that were open suddenly appeared to be closed. Cases that were closed showed as open. Test results could not be found.

That left the agency with no straightforward way of knowing the status of countless cases without manually checking dozens of separate data points in ADAMS — which has its own reliability issues — for each case. It also meant that WADA could not easily know if there were other problematic cases where its intervention was required.

The seriousness of the situation may go far beyond the embarrassment of an IT fiasco and frustrated officials. Noncompliance with the global anti-doping code can lead to penalties and suspensions, which in the case of Russia led to a yearslong ban from international sports.

Traditionally, WADA has determined and issued those punishments. Now, its own lawyers warned in May, it risked being in serious violation of its own rules.

“WADA’s significant responsibility and important role as the world’s leading anti-doping authority is of utmost importance and must not be undermined by a lack of action and transparency,” said Linda Helleland, a former vice president of the agency.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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