Doping: "We will be very vigilant" ahead of the 2024 Olympics, warns AFLD

What will be the role of AFLD during the Olympic Games in Paris?

Paradoxically, it is not the agency that will perform the tests on athletes during the Olympics, it is the ITA, the international control agency.

On the other hand, we will have a very important role of coordinating the players in the fight against doping in France, whether it be the police, gendarmerie, intelligence services and also all the checks that the ITA will ask us to carry out. upstream of the Olympics.

To discover

• The results of the 2020 Olympics

• The Olympic medal table

The fact that the Olympics are taking place in Paris, however, creates additional pressure ...

Absolutely.

The Olympic Games must be exemplary in terms of anti-doping.

We are going to control all the French athletes of the Olympic delegation, and it will be more important since France is the host country.

We will be very vigilant on the checks before the Olympics.

Are there more sensitive sports to watch out for?

In the Olympic disciplines, it is always the same ones that require particular supervision and supervision, these are the strength or endurance disciplines.

In recent years, the rate of positive tests has been declining in most anti-doping agencies around the world. How do you explain that ?

I think it was under the influence of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) which has acquired an increasingly important role as a world policeman. And she asked all the ONA (National Anti-Doping Organizations, editor's note) in their country to strengthen control over high-level sport. And we know that top athletes are normally better trained in anti-doping than amateurs, they pay more attention. Obviously there are cheaters among them, that's for sure, since we track them down.

At WADA's request, you have also developed your investigation department, which benefits from new powers (search, borrowed identity on the internet, etc.). Is this the sign of a new way of approaching the fight against doping?

It is a modern way of fighting doping in the sense that we go beyond testing only through urine and blood tests.

There are many, many anti-doping rule violations that do not result in the taking of products.

There is product trafficking, there is the refusal to submit to a control ... All these violations that do not fall under laboratory analysis.

And to establish proofs, it is as easy to have proof by a positive analysis made by the laboratory, as much to prove trafficking, it is more difficult, hence the need to make inquiries. .