Insider’s View
Michael Ashenden is not an activist. He is a respected scientist in anti-doping research. He helped develop Olympic doping tests. He played a key role in creating the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP), the cornerstone of modern blood doping detection. Twenty years ago, he warned about blood manipulation and contributed to exposing Lance Armstrong.
Today, he looks at his legacy with alarm. The man who helped build the system now says it is broken. Worse, he says, it has become cynical. This is not a pro-doping voice. It is an insider who saw the flaws from within.
WADA: Not a Watchdog, but an Errand Boy
The official position is that WADA is an independent guardian of clean sport. Ashenden rejects that. In his view, WADA takes orders from two masters: the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and powerful national governments.
WADA is not a real rule‑maker, he argues. It is an executor. That explains, he says, the glaring inconsistencies and selective enforcement. WADA avoids investigations that could harm sponsors and looks the other way when politics demands it.
Double Standards: Athlete Health Comes Last
Ashenden’s most striking claim concerns priorities. The Olympic movement refuses to conduct year‑round testing for recreational drugs — cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines. Yet these substances pose a real and immediate risk to life under extreme physical exertion.
At the same time, the system harshly penalizes substances that, under medical supervision, are relatively safe.
“This is direct proof that the bans serve some other purpose — not health protection,” Ashenden says.
If WADA truly prioritized athlete safety, testing priorities would look different. They do not. They look exactly as one would expect if the goal were to protect the Olympic brand.
The TUE Loophole: When a Ban Is Not a Ban
No mechanism illustrates the hypocrisy better than the Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) — a system that allows athletes to legally use banned substances with a medical diagnosis.
On paper, the TUE system serves a legitimate purpose. Athletes with real conditions — asthma, ADHD, chronic illnesses — should not have to choose between health and career. In practice, critics say, it has become a legal doping lane for those with the right doctors and the right passports.
The numbers are striking. In 2015 alone, WADA’s database recorded 1,330 TUEs. Of those, 63 percent went to athletes from just three countries — the United States, Australia, and France. That same year, the US filed 653 TUE applications and approved 402 — a 46 percent increase from the previous year. Approval rates varied widely by country, raising obvious questions about consistency and fairness.
Then came the Fancy Bears hack in September 2016. A Russian cyber‑espionage group breached WADA’s database and began releasing confidential medical files of dozens of Olympic athletes. The leaked documents showed that some of the biggest names in global sport had been competing not despite banned substances — but with them, legally.
Simone Biles, the American gymnast who won four gold medals at the Rio Olympics, had received permission to take methylphenidate (Ritalin) — a powerful psychostimulant banned by WADA — to treat ADHD. She had been taking it since 2012. Serena and Venus Williams were revealed to have TUEs for a cocktail of potent drugs, including oxycodone, prednisolone, methylprednisolone, and hydromorphone — a morphine derivative classified as a narcotic in many jurisdictions.
The reaction was split. WADA’s TUE Expert Group, chaired by Professor David Gerrard, issued an urgent statement insisting the system remained robust and that the leaks violated athlete privacy, not evidence of wrongdoing. US Anti‑Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygert called the hack “a malicious and illegal invasion of athlete privacy.”
But questions did not go away. If these athletes are so ill that they require powerful narcotics and stimulants to function, how are they simultaneously able to win Olympic gold? As one Russian sports doctor put it: “If they need to constantly take such serious drugs just to live — that is essentially a disability.”
Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics (then IAAF) and a two‑time Olympic champion, defended the TUE system as fundamentally sound while acknowledging the need for “permanent vigilance” against abuse. Exercise physiologist Ross Tucker was more cautious but pointed: “When you start talking about injections and oral use… you’re talking about athletes that are medically quite sick. I wonder whether there is not something dubious there. That doesn’t stack up in my opinion.”
The TUE system does not create the double standard Ashenden condemns — but it perfectly reflects it. Wealthy athletes from powerful nations, with access to top sports medicine professionals, secure exemptions that athletes from less privileged backgrounds cannot obtain. WADA insists the process is rigorous and independent. But the data show that some countries are much better at navigating it than others.
‘A Perverted Monster’ for Athletes
What does the modern athlete face? Ashenden describes it bleakly:
- Total surveillance. Athletes must report their whereabouts every day during a testing window — effectively forfeiting their right to privacy.
- Absurd rules. A contaminated kebab bought at a railway station — meat containing traces of banned veterinary drugs — can end a career.
- Unequal justice. Ordinary medicines are banned on competition day, while top athletes with the right diagnoses can legally use narcotics and stimulants.
Year after year, the prohibited list changes. Rules become more convoluted. The system, in Ashenden’s exact words, has become “a perverted monster” — terrorizing honest athletes while failing to catch the real cheats.
The Myth of ‘Purity’ Is a Commercial Product
Ashenden calls for an end to hypocrisy. The myth of “natural” sport is dead. Elite sport is a triumph of science and technology — hypoxic chambers, genetic analysis, optimized nutrition, aerodynamic fabrics. All of these are enhancements that separate champions from amateurs.
WADA and the IOC understand this perfectly. But their business is selling the illusion of purity. Spectators pay for a fairy tale: victory comes only from sweat and sacrifice. Show them the truth about legal technological doping, and the product loses value.
“The Olympic movement has become a commodity sold to the highest bidder. By guarding the myth of purity, WADA protects its commercial product — not the principles of fair play,” says the creator of the biological passport.
Bottom Line
Here is the unprecedented situation. A scientist who received WADA grants, who built its technical backbone, now calls the system ineffective and hypocritical. He does not advocate legalizing doping. He advocates honesty: either abandon the dishonest bans, or stop torturing athletes for the sake of sponsors’ illusions.
Ashenden’s words are not defeatist. They are an opportunity for sport to stop being a “perverted monster” and return to what it was meant to be — fair competition, not a battle of lawyers and bureaucrats, and not a system where a well‑documented medical diagnosis opens the door to the very substances everyone else is banned from taking.
The only question is whether the IOC and WADA are ready to listen to their most authoritative critic. Or whether they will continue selling the product — with their fingers in their ears.
