Anti-doping testing: a moving target?

On July 2, 2018, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) has confirmed that the four-time Tour de France winner Christopher Froome has been cleared by the allegation of possible doping, notified on a urine sample collected during the Tour of Spain 2017, since the positivity of this specimen was no longer considered an adverse analytical finding (AAF) by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Although we would all agree that anti-doping testing is probably unavoidable for safeguarding athletes’ health and preserving fairness in competition, the current anti-doping strategy has many drawbacks other than the potential impact of preanalytical issues (thus including biological variation) on the fixed thresholds for drugs subjects to TUE. Some of these limitations are probably unsurmountable (i.e., high cost, late development of tests for new doping agents and methods), whilst additional efforts should be envisaged to overcome other current caveats, which seem generally more amendable and relatively easier to address. Rethinking the whole anti-doping policy as a continuously moving target, dependent also on human biology rather than simply based on analytical findings, is perhaps the more suitable strategy to preserve sport integrity and safeguarding athletes’ reputation in the foreseeable future.