No room for complacency

As the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) for sport celebrates its first decade of operations, director-general David Howman says the anti-drug message was being appreciated but there was no reason to be complacent with progress so far.

Howman pointed to the fact that 193 governments, the number recognised by Unesco, agreed that they would ratify theanti-doping treaty and so far 129 have ratified and the remainder represented about 10 percent of the world's population and were mainly from smaller nations.

Getting those countries on board was a case of helping them realise what signing the document meant in issues they were not often exposed to.

"I'm pretty confident we're going to get the whole 193. By comparison, the International Treaty for the Rights of Children, 10 years after it was initiated, still does have the same number of signatories as we do," he said.

Measuring progress was always difficult because many countries did not know about anti-doping before Wada started, he said.

But 15 regional anti-doping organisations with pooled resources had been formed to do the monitoring.

However, because Wada relied on agencies to do the dope testing, its role was more in terms of assessing information gleaned and devising strategies to ensure the impetus built up is maintained.

One of the major areas of advance has been in assessing mis-use of EPO.

Howman said that while EPO was regarded as one of the scourges afflicting sport, it was a fact that there were 30-40 types of EPO and the EPOs in use had reached a third generation of development.

However, an advanced system of analysing the samples has been developed to improve the testing.

Howman feels the gap between cheats and clean performance has narrowed and Wada had got better at what it did but he added that it wasn't going to be about science.

"Science keeps up but it doesn't get ahead, and science sometimes takes two or three years to get what you want so you have got to look at ways of gathering evidence from other sources and that's where we pull in the customs and Interpol, and that sort of thing."

Howman also feels the awareness among sportspeople of their requirements in relation to doping in sport had grown. Studies are underway to assess this point, but one already completed in Norway showed that 84 percent were fully aware of anti-doping and the rest were aware, but not fully.

That showed how far the message had gone.

A significant concern remains the major leagues of sports in the United States.

"We're moving. The commissioner of the NFL has come to visit us. They've taken it seriously and are looking at ways and means of getting closer to what we do. Their major issue is sanctions," Howman said.

"Major league baseball still have their heads in the sand a little I am afraid. They seem to have tried a little but don't seem to have progressed as far as we would like.

"Hockey has advanced and they are talking about getting the same standard and code. Basketball has never been a major problem and their international federation is quite strong, golf has moved, tennis has moved."

What made the American situation difficult was a lack of levers because you couldn't go to the government, or the Olympic committee, and ask for help. And the only route was to go directly to the leagues with the