“As an unequivocal confirmation of its commitment to eradicating the use of prohibited substances and methods in triathlon, World Triathlon continues to commit time, effort, energy and a substantial budget to its anti-doping mission.”
Lifted directly from World Triathlon’s website, the pledge of the sport’s governing body to tackle doping has noble intentions and should come across as reassuring. Yet in practice it may succeed in doing little more than chasing its own tail.
Doping has returned once more to the foreground of the conversation in elite triathlon after Yuliya Yelistratova was issued with a five year ban for doping offences. A three-time World Cup winner and three-time Olympian, Yelistratova returned adverse samples at an in-competition test in June 2021 and at an out-of-competition test in July 2021.
She was therefore suspended ahead of the Tokyo Olympics and has now been formally banned.
On the surface, the Yelistratova case appears to be done and dusted and can be consigned to the annals of history. None of the relevant parties are appealing the ban and there is a slim probability that Yelistratova returns to the elite sport.
Rather than brushing it away, though, there are important questions to ask about the Yelistratova case. In turn, these raise vital questions for the entire anti-doping infrastructure and pose a simple question. Is it actually fit for purpose?
We will start with Yelistratova’s first adverse finding in June 2021.
The positive test came at the Dnipro European Cup, a race that Yelistratova won. Her victory there was not out of touch with the rest of her career. Alongside her three World Cup gold medals, she won sixteen other European Cup races in addition to the Dnipro event.
The consistency of Yelistratova’s performances creates a conundrum. In some cases of doping, it is easy to identify a clear period of elevated performance that coincides with a subsequent positive test.
This is not the case with Yelistratova.
Instead, her results are remarkably consistent across a period of over ten years. If she felt the need to dope to win in June 2021, it is hard to say whether she did or did not reach for the same chemical enhancements to achieve her earlier successes.
This notion is reinforced by the fact that she returned a second adverse finding a little over a month later in July 2021. Her doping cannot be called a one-off scenario. She was literally caught twice.
Moreover, her July positive came barely a week before the Tokyo Olympic Games and indicates that she fully intended to dope at the Games. Again, if she was willing to break the rules at one Olympics, it is hard to imagine that it was out of pattern with her three other Olympic appearances.
Of course, personal or commercial pressures could have been at play. Moreover, in the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020 challenges with mental health were commonplace. We do not know if any of these factors contributed to Yelistratova’s doping. Maybe they prompted her to start doping in 2021.
Then again, maybe they did not.
By June 2021, Yelistratova had already qualified for the Olympics. In addition, her prior performance profile did not mark her out as a potential medallist. There was thus no pressing need to boost her performance, nor an explicable sudden Olympic pressure that dictated her actions. On the balance of probabilities, maybe it is fair to say her doping commenced prior to June 2021.
When it comes to Yelistratova, the issue soon becomes murkier upon further examination.
Her husband, Ukrainian elite triathlete Daniil Sapunov, was sanctioned for four years in 2020 for an anti-doping violation. Sapunov returned a positive result four days before the 2019 Ironman World Championships at which he finished 24th.
Like Yelistratova, Sapunov was a three-time Olympian (in 2004, 2008 and 2012), representing Kazakhstan and then Ukraine during his short course career. He also won a European Cup in his time in draft-legal racing.
Sapunov thus tested positive in 2019. It would take over eighteen months for his wife to then test positive. Again, no one can say for sure when Yelistratova first doped. When both partners have been found guilty of the same offence, though, the likelihood is that there must have been some kind of knowledge of one another’s actions.
It should be noted that Yelistratova is not a purely theoretical proposition at TriStats. One of the co-founders can recall being pipped to a World Cup medal by her and the various rumours that existed at the time. We therefore empathise with the athletes that have been beaten at various points by someone later exposed for doping.
The issue, though, is not exactly Yelistratova.
Rather, the conversation that needs to be had is whether the existing anti-doping framework is equipped to meet the challenges facing it.
With Yelistratova, the multiple positive samples, the fact her husband tested positive two years prior and the persistence of doubts over her performance in elite circles maybe should have inspired closer investigation much sooner.
However, as much as World Triathlon declares that it devotes a “substantial budget” towards anti-doping, it is woefully underprepared to investigate possible offences.
World Triathlon divides athletes into the Testing Pool and Registered Testing Pool for observation, with the latter group facing slightly more stringent rules.
Based on World Triathlon’s testing data from 2020, an athlete in the Testing Pool would have been unlucky to have endured one out-of-competition test and borderline cursed to have encountered two. Furthermore, a little over 11% of the attempted tests were unsuccessful.
This tracks with what athletes such as Marten Van Riel have publicly declared. According to Van Riel, in over ten years of filling out his whereabouts form for WADA, he has had on average a single out-of-competition test per year.
The challenge facing World Triathlon is therefore twofold. It is practical as well as philosophical.
On the practical front, the 2020 data and the Yelistratova case indicate that the testing volume is far below what is required. It should not be forgotten that Igor Polyanskiy of Russia actually tested positive at the Tokyo Olympics and accepted a subsequent ban.
The issue of doping is so much bigger than Yelistratova. Indeed, with the Olympics on the line, it would be understandable if several more of the field turned to a chemical shortcut.
In an ideal world, every single elite triathlete (or perhaps those competing at the World Cup level and above) should be subjected to an out-of-competition test every month. One test a year will only catch the sloppiest rule-breakers. As it is, the system is simply too slow.
The second aspect at play is philosophical. To be more precise, it concerns the attitude of zero tolerance within anti-doping.
Yelistratova has had her results from 5 June 2021 onwards disqualified. However, that was the date she was caught. It was not the date she started doping.
At the very least, the intention to dope began earlier than that. It is highly improbable that an athlete would wake up on race day, locate banned substances, ingest said banned substances and then race.
Whether a week, a month, a year earlier, the decision was made to cheat. Hence, the cheating began before she was caught.
If zero tolerance was to truly stand for zero tolerance, every prior result for an athlete found guilty of doping should be disqualified. Unless said athlete can satisfy beyond reasonable doubt that they started doping at a specific time, their entire career must be tarnished.
The penalty for doping – the loss of the future – is not as significant as the potential scrubbing away of the past. If an athlete was found to have doped and had their results disqualified and were forced to return all of their prize money, there would be a real force behind anti-doping.
After their ban, the athlete could then return with a clean slate to encourage a semblance of rehabilitation.
As things stand, though, the system of punishment for doping amounts to sending a bank robber to jail for a couple of years while letting them keep the money they stole.
When the sport inevitably moves on from the latest news of the Yelistratova ban, attention on anti-doping will likely move away.
For the integrity of the sport, it is imperative that conversations about the practical and philosophical realities of anti-doping. Testing every athlete every month would be expensive, that cannot be disputed. When a previous Olympic champion and previous world champion have been busted for doping, though, the sport cannot afford to take any risks.
Ultimately, the question to be confronted now is simple. What does zero tolerance really mean?
