Stephen Fisher | February 8, 2026
For many athletes and fans around the globe, winning a gold medal at the Olympics is the pinnacle of success in sport. With an estimated cumulative audience of 5 billion people for the most recent 2024 Paris Summer Games, Olympic athletes have earned the opportunity to represent their countries in one of the most spectacular and prestigious events offered in sport. That prestige comes not only from the level of performance often seen at the games, but also from the history and what the games represent –unity, perseverance, and fairness.
Despite the carefully curated image of the Olympics, there have been instances where the Games’ fairness has been put into doubt. In recent years, the Olympics have faced backlash following large scale doping scandals that have put into question what the international anti-doping community is doing to prevent the use of performance enhancing drugs. In 2014, a Russian state-sponsored doping program was uncovered that implicated many of its Olympic athletes. Only a few years later, 23 Chinese swimmers returned positive doping tests just prior to the 2021 games in Tokyo but faced no punishment. In that case, Chinese anti-doping officials concluded that the results came from contaminated food, and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accepted the explanation and declined to appeal. Although doping regulations may appear to have an international standard, enforcement of these regulations is conducted by national sporting agencies through domestic legal and institutional frameworks, which produces uneven accountability and enables systemic failures.
World Anti-Doping Agency
The infamous Festina affair played a seminal role in the development of international anti-doping regulation. In the 1998 Tour de France, the Festina team was caught with performance enhancing substances, which led to the revelation that many teams in the tour were abusing banned substances. That year, nearly half of the cyclists were not allowed to finish the race for doping related violations, causing an international push for stronger anti-doping regulations. This push culminated the following year in the inception of WADA.
WADA states that their primary function is to “develop, harmonize, and coordinate” anti-doping regulations for all sports globally. They do this by (1) ensuring effective implementation of their anti-doping standards, (2) advancing anti-doping related research, (3) education, (4) conducting investigations, and (5) building anti-doping capacity with anti-doping organizations worldwide. WADA’s international legitimacy derives from the contractual adoption of its standards by sport organizations, and their endorsement by states. WADA states that implementation of their standards is the responsibility of signatories of their “World Anti-Doping Code,” according to their authority and jurisdiction. This means that compliance is outsourced to respective countries and organizations. Additionally, investigations are done in collaboration with partners, including a country’s national anti-doping organization (NADO). This model grants countries significant power and flexibility in regulating their athletes.
Olympic Doping Scandals
In a 2014 exposé, a German journalist uncovered a secret doping program in Russian athletics. This secret program, which was found to have been going on for many years, involved bribery, high ranking Russian officials, and substitution of urine samples prior to the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. Hundreds of athletes and state officials were implicated, and Russia was banned from international sport for four-years. Russia was, nevertheless, permitted to send a team to the 2016 Rio Summer Games, and Russians who did not have a history of doping were allowed to compete at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.” This scandal illustrates the challenges faced by WADA in enforcing anti-doping standards when potentially corrupt officials are given the responsibility for enforcing regulations. Because testing laboratories, oversight bodies, and investigative bodies were under the authority of the Russian state, the bodies that were meant to be enforcing the regulations became party to the corruption.
Another example that illustrates the potential for inconsistency in investigations, is the Chinese swimming team leading into the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games. In this case, 23 team members tested positive for trimetazidine, a heart medication that is used to improve endurance, at a training camp just months before the games started. In response to the results, Chinese anti-doping officials cleared all the athletes determining that the 23 positive results stemmed from contaminated food. WADA agreed with the Chinese group and all the athletes were allowed to compete in Tokyo. Regardless of the veracity of the explanation, this case exposes how WADA relies on national organizations. Although WADA stood by their decision, many swimmers and NADO officials have criticized WADA’s actions and the framework that permits athletes who have tested positive with banned substances to compete.
The Problem with Domestic Governance
The challenge faced by WADA is that the delegation of enforcement responsibility to individual countries significantly decreases their ability to maintain equal standards of governance. Independent analysis was commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport examining various countries’ national integrity bodies, which are involved in ethics in sport and anti-doping, found significant differences in each body’s method and ability to govern effectively. Notably, one of the most disparate points of data that was found was each body’s annual budget. From the data the researchers were able to gather, annual budgets ranged from 2.6 million British pounds in New Zealand to an astounding 34.4 million British pounds in Australia. Even considering the population differences between those countries, Australia is operating with much more capital to regulate their sports.
Athletes have also noticed this disparity. Roger Federer, a tennis world champion and four time Olympian, has commented on the disparity in the frequency of testing based on where athletes live. Having lived in both Switzerland and Dubai, Federer revealed that, in his experience, there was a lack of standardization across the countries. Federer recalled that when living in Switzerland, testing was frequent, compared to when he was in Dubai, he was only tested once in 15 years.
Future Improvements
WADA’s primary function of harmonizing anti-doping regulation is not being enforced consistently. As an international body reliant on state self-enforcement, WADA’s model does not align with the international problem they are trying to solve. By focusing on individual athlete liability while allowing states to hold primary responsibility for enforcement, WADA’s model gives rise to opportunities for state involvement, or state tolerance. A practice that becomes reasonable when considering the national pride associated with success on an international stage, such as the Olympics. Alternate models of international governance, such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) could provide a framework that addresses WADA’s institutional weaknesses.
The ICAO is a United Nations agency that governs global aviation and the sharing of the skies around the world. In 1944, 54 nations signed the Chicago Convention, which establishes the ICAO and authorizes the agency to develop international aviation standards. Like anti-doping regulation, the Chicago Convention delegates enforcement to domestic bodies, however, the ICAO audits on the ability of those states to implement the standards. ICAO’s audit and monitoring model allows deficiencies to be caught early, before they culminate in large scale scandals.
Taking a page out of the ICAO’s model would permit WADA to perform its function more efficiently and with more fairness across its signatories. There already exists a United Nations International Convention against Doping in Sport, which currently encourages states to align domestic law with the WADA code but does not give WADA express authority. Amending this Convention to more closely resemble the Chicago Convention could provide WADA with a stricter treaty foundation to lean on when violations occur. The IACO also has a better auditing system, a practice which would assist WADA in performing their function. Rather than focusing primarily on laboratory compliance, WADA audits should audit the credibility of NADOs. When NADOs have the authority over their country’s sports, audits should focus on their credibility rather than the extent that they claim rules are being followed. WADA audits could proactively allow sanctions and consequences to be imposed on states as their credibility begins to wane rather than after the uncovering of a large-scale scandal.
Comparable international frameworks of governance demonstrate that effective enforcement is a function of institutional design. By permitting Olympic teams and their home states to vouch for their own compliance, WADA has adopted a structure with an inherent conflict of interest. Without centralized oversight, uneven accountability becomes a predictable outcome for the international anti-doping regulator.