A Note on Wherabouts Failures:

If an athlete has 3 whereabouts failures in a year, we as a society MUST view that as a positive test.

If an athlete is taking drugs out-of-competition, why on Earth would they submit to a test when prompted?

The modern age of PEDs sees athletes taking drugs in training, and showing up to competitions with the substances out of their system.

The only way we can effectively combat the problem is to monitor athletes out of competition.

3 tests is enormously generous.

But it needs to be, because it’s not feasible to crack down on the first miss. You miss once, that’s life. I have friends who I know are clean who have missed an out-of-comp test. But guess what, when that happens, you go on absolute red alert.

You absolutely prioritize not getting a second. For a clean athlete, a second would be catastrophically terrifying. And there’s even a small sliver of proabability life might happen again (might be akin to a “false positive”, <<1%), you STILL have a third as a safety net.

Now flip that - if you’re an athlete taking banned substances, you can essentially dope indiscriminately out-of-competition until the tester shows up for the first time!

By the way, if you’re not a highly-ranked athlete yet, you’re probably not even in that pool.

So, you could go the whole year without ever having someone knock on your door. The probability of being out-of-comp tested is quite low!

But let’s say they eventually do - you know you have substances in your system - you just don’t answer. Simple.

Now, conservatively speaking, you could stop your drug routine there, have basically had no negative repercussions, but reap the benefits from however long you were using them up until that point.

Or, if you want to push the envelope, you could keep taking drugs. You still have two more strikes!

Let’s say you do that - now the tester comes a second time. This is more likely, as a first wherabouts failure would likely put you as high risk.

You don’t answer the door, again

Very simple. Two free warnings!

Now, if you’re scared or nervous, you could either (a) stop taking drugs, train and compete clean for the rest of the year until your first wherabouts failure expires or (b) tell the world you have an injury and call it a season.

Either of those options are fantastic for you. They save face. You avoid any public knowledge, let alone condemnation, and have to at worst sacrifice less than a year (until you can start to try to use drugs again) or at best, just go on and compete with the gains you made before

Now, after two, an athlete could get greedy and continue to try and cheat, at which point maybe missing a third for the above reasons happens. Or, perhaps they rode the line, got two and backed off, but then life happened. They blew their generous 2-strike safety net on cheating.

The wherabouts system is enormously lenient, if not a loophole, for cheaters.

Moreover, the ban is only 2 yrs. An outright positive is 4 yrs. Again: if you have drugs in your system, why answer the knock?

Also, it gives the athlete a smokescreen to “defend” his/her reputation.

The system is better than nothing, but it affords long periods of abuse with what are essentially warnings with no repercussions.

It’s exceedingly generous to definitively protect clean athletes. It does that.

If an athlete gets three failures, they are cheating.

End of story.