World Rugby’s anti-doping figures for RWC fail to add up

A fellow called Nursultan Nazarbayev is the president of Kazakhstan. In April of this year Nazarbayev was re-elected with almost 98 per cent of the vote.

There is no reason to believe the Kazakh people don’t love him and, while we may look on the figure with scepticism, we just accept it for what it is.

This week World Rugby published a summary of its anti-doping figures for the Rugby World Cup (RWC) competition and the months prior to it. All 20 participating teams took part with 200 in-competition samples and 268 out-of-competition samples collected.

The respected UK Anti-Doping (Ukad) agency carried out analysis on 468 blood and urine samples. We don’t have a breakdown of what they were testing for, but the number of adverse findings was a big bagel, zilch, zero.

We may also look on that figure with some healthy scepticism but, just as with Mr Nazarbayev’s faithful voters, we accept it for what it is.

We can be sceptical because figures put out each year by the World Anti Doping Agency (Wada) show that between one and two percent of athletes across sports are doping.

What the stats from Wada’s number- crunching tell us is that we shouldn’t have been surprised if upwards of four positive tests came back from that number of samples and perhaps as many as seven.

Given the 468 tests. Given the zero return. Given 1.5 per cent is a number you could expect to be positive, the probability of World Rugby having no adverse findings was 50-1 or a two per cent chance. The chance of seven or under coming back positive was 50 per cent.

Banned athletes

But sometimes the figures can be confusing because of different lists. The World Rugby list of banned athletes available on their website contains just one name for 2015, that of

Carl Townsend

of

Wales

.

Although he was tested in May of this year representing a Wales development sevens team, he doesn’t appear in the zero findings because he’s not a RWC player.

Then there is the Ukad list, also available on their website. There are two banned rugby union players listed there for 2015 and neither of them is Carl Townsend.

There are nine people on the 2014 Ukad list of banned rugby union players across the Wales, Scotland and English Rugby Unions. World Rugby's figure for 2014 is five individuals.

In other words testers, Ukad, in England, Wales and Scotland are catching more cheating rugby players in the UK than the entire testing apparatus of World Rugby across the globe.

The zero finding for the 20 RWC teams has been returned by Ukad but in the context of doping in the sport it is, well, what it is.

Of the 16 rugby names on the Ukad banned list going back to 2012, 10 of them are players from Wales. The actual global numbers of rugby players taking banned substances can only be guessed if France, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, Argentina (whose national drug testing agency was recently ruled non compliant by Wada), Russia (whose Anti-Doping Agency has been suspended by Wada) and the rest of the nations were added.

Zero is far from the number.

In 2011, the year of the last World Cup in New Zealand, World Rugby recorded just eight violations, while in 2012 there were 21 violations from 1542 tests. The 2012 figure represented a fraction less than a 1.4 per cent strike rate, inside the accepted global average.

But even that cheating benchmark has been seriously questioned in recent years. A couple of studies have shown that the figure of 1-2 per cent could be an unrealistically low mark with the proportion of cheating athletes running much higher.

The largest survey in doping amongst triathlon competitors was carried out last year. Published in the international, peer-reviewed, open-access publication PLOS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203), the results carried a health warning.

In a study involving almost 3,000 athletes, 13 per cent admitted to using steroids, EPO and Human Growth Hormone, 15 per cent admitted to the use of antidepressants, beta-blockers, modafinil and methylphenidate and 20 per cent admitted to doping at the European championships in Frankfurt.

In 2011 a survey was carried out by 10 international researchers from a range of organisations including Wada, British, German, American and Hungarian universities. They found that among elite athletes at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu the prevalence of doping was 29-34 per cent and in the 2011 Pan-Arab Games in Doha, the prevalence of doping was at 45-50 per cent.

The findings, based on athlete response with guaranteed confidentiality, were provocative but the results suggested that the prevalence of doping was much higher than the biological testing indicates.

The IAAF withheld and disputed the results, which the researchers argued were robust, before the New York Times ran the story in August 2013.

Zero finding

There is sometimes dispute over figures in doping and World Rugby have argued that the people taking banned products are at the lower level of the sport, some of them trying to break into professional rugby to earn contracts. Once that is achieved, say the governing body, the more rigorous testing kicks in and those cheating either stop or will be caught.

The zero finding in the latest figures suggest they stop. But again that is opinion and an accepted point of view is that elite athletes are more likely to take drugs because of the higher level of performance required. There is also more to win, and lose, financially at elite levels.

Rugby will say it is not athletics or the triathlon and you cannot compare sports. Maybe they are right. But the doping world has become a deeply cynical world. It is a world where a zero figure sits as uncomfortably as 98 per cent does in Kazakhstan.