Soccer shouldn’t be an anti-doping exception

PARIS (AP) — Imagine the outcry if, for a few weeks each year, police stopped catching criminals who try to cheat and rob. Absurd, right?

Yet that, more or less, is what the bosses of soccer have in mind for the fight against doping.

FIFA and UEFA, the powerful world and European governing bodies of the global game, say top players shouldn’t be drug-tested during their summer vacations.

Their statement last week couldn’t have been clearer: “FIFA and UEFA do not accept that controls be undertaken during the short holiday period of players, in order to respect their private life.”

Privacy reasons aside, they also argue that soccer should be treated differently because it doesn’t suffer from the doping scandals that have undermined public confidence in other sports — track and field, weightlifting and cycling spring to mind — and because soccer players are already available for frequent drug testing during their busy seasons of up to 49-50 weeks each year.

“The idea that one size fits everybody doesn’t work,” says FIFA’s chief medical officer, Jiri Dvorak. “You fight crime differently in one country to another country and in doping, it’s the same.”

His counterpart at UEFA, Michel D’Hooghe, is even more adamant.

“We will not do any more testing during the vacations,” he said in a phone interview. “That is absolutely clear and definite.”

Arguably the world’s most popular sport, soccer should be a leader here. But instead, FIFA and UEFA are punching a loophole in the idea that year-round, unannounced drug testing is the most effective means to catch and deter dopers.

Mushiness risks sending players the message that the need to fight doping in sports is not as serious as it seems, even if soccer may not be the worst offender.

If soccer players are given testing outs, why not cyclists or sprinters, too? That’s a slippery slope the sports world shouldn’t travel down.

FIFA’s and UEFA’s medical men say they don’t believe that players take drugs during their off-weeks. But they or we cannot be sure if testing won’t be done.

There’s heaps of evidence from other sports that some dopers use competition breaks to illegally build up muscles and endurance with banned pills, patches and injections. They then return to competition seemingly as clean as a whistle, the traces of their cheating long since gone from their urine even though the performance-enhancing effects linger on.

Giving drug testers the power to roll-up almost anytime, anywhere, 365 days a year to take samples for analysis may be inconvenient to the athlete but it increases the otherwise slim chances that such cheating can be deterred.

There may be some truth to arguments that soccer players don’t need to take banned performance-enhancers because theirs is a sport of skill and teamwork more than endurance or raw power. There’s no pill to make a Pele.

FIFA and UEFA say soccer conducts 25,000-30,000 doping controls each year. National anti-doping agencies test, too. All Champions League teams also get unannounced tests, with 10 players selected each time, and those that reach the final will have been tested at least four times, Dvorak says.

The vast majority of tests come back negative. Dvorak says there were just nine to 12 cases per year of anabolic steroids or the endurance-booster EPO in the past five years in soccer, “which is almost negligible.”

“I have no indication of systematic doping in soccer,” he said in a phone interview. “You can call me naive, but I am used to that.”

Numbers are not always what they seem. Disgraced sprint star Marion Jones and many others in a variety of sports tested negative before they were caught.

And tests conducted by France’s anti-doping agency this year on 32 hair samples taken from professional soccer players found traces of DHEA, a banned substance that can be used to boost testosterone levels, in seven cases. That was more than in the other sports the French agency tested — cycling, rugby and track.

Dvorak dismissed those findings as “not scientific.” But at least the French were willing to dig.

Soccer’s opposition to making players available for 365-day a year testing puts it on a collision course with the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA’s rules are meant to apply to all. Soccer shouldn’t be allowed to pick those it wants to adhere to.