Doping in olympic sport: crisis and ways to overcome it

The paper analyses the modern history of the spread of doping in Olympic sports, the IOC’s fight against this negative phenomenon and activities of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) established in 1999 and designed to eradicate doping. It is shown that, despite the ever-increasing financial and human resources and legal capabilities, intensive propaganda efforts, increased volume of testing, severe sanctions, and support from reputable international organizations (UN, UNESCO, Council of Europe), the Agency's multi-year activities is not only brought Olympic sport closer to solving the problem, but also dramatically aggravated and made it dangerous for the credibility and the well-being of the Olympic movement. It is not only and not so much about the competition in elite sport that dramatically increased in recent years along with socio-political and commercial attractiveness of success at the Olympics, but about fundamentally misguided methodology underlying the WADA activities and based on the neglect of the achievements of biological, medical, and sports sciences and the realities of the modern high performance sport, and drawn up on the ideas of lawyers, economists, and «universal managers». The paper outlines in detail outcomes of the activities of the WADA and anti-doping laboratories accredited by the Agency, which manifested themselves in many crisis phenomena moved far beyond the limits of the Olympic sport. Furthermore, the prospects of coming out of the grave crisis developed in this area are delineated