SIR CRAIG REEDIE is in line to be confirmed as the third president of the World Anti-Doping Agency on Friday during the World Conference on Doping in Sport which begins in Johannesburg today.
The Scot, who is sole nominee for the post, is currently vice-president of the International Olympic Committee and played a pivotal role in securing the Olympic Games for London as board member of the organising committee, LOCOG. He was duly knighted for his services.
The conference comes at the end of a turbulent year for sport during which numerous drug scandals have emerged, not least Lance Armstrong's confession that he doped throughout his career and later the positive tests for banned substances by both the former 100m world champion, Tyson Gay and the former 100m world record holder Asafa Powell.
The Scot secured his nomination by the IOC in August, preferred to such as the former Olympic hurdles champion Edwin Moses and the former IOC medical director Patrick Schamasch. The vote to elect Reedie, already a member of the WADA executive board, should be a formality as he stands unopposed. He will succeed the Australian, John Fahey, from January 1, 2014.
For the first time since 2007, it is expected that a new World Anti-Doping Code will be ratified in Johannesburg. WADA considered some 4000 amendments and have implemented around 2000 in total, with the changes to come into force in 2015.
One of the most significant alterations is the proposal to double the duration of suspensions for first-time serious offences from two years to four, a penalty which would be sure to keep offenders out of an Olympic Games. Athletes who tamper with, or refuse to take, drugs tests will also be banned for four years.
The new code will make it easier to sanction an athlete's entourage - coaches, managers, agents, trainers - who push their client into illegal doping. Currently, support staff are often outwith the jurisdiction of
anti-doping authorities. The WADA statute of limitations will also be extended from eight years to 10, allowing test samples to be stored for two extra years for retrospective testing.
Despite the hardening of WADA's stance on serious dopers, there will be a proposal to allow the organisation more flexibility for punishments for "inadvertent dopers", those who take substances by mistake or take contaminated substances unwittingly.
WADA will also propose that every anti-doping authority will have a list of banned substances specific to each sport for which they must test, ensuring that every nation's anti-doping organisation tests athletes for the same range of substances regardless of their location, and so ensure consistency.
A steroid passport is expected to be unveiled, joining the biological passport as a method of monitoring long-term changes in an athlete's system. The technology for this new passport monitoring system will be available immediately for any anti-doping authority which would like to make use of it.
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