ABSTRACT
Chapter four analyses how the whereabouts system has generated challenges to the legitimacy of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), and the organisation’s responses to these challenges. The whereabouts system policy stipulates the daily expectation that elite athletes provide anti-doping authorities with a place where they can be located for one hour, so that testing can occur without prior warning. However, this policy has been subject to criticism due to perceived infringements on an athlete’s right to privacy, inequitable local implementation in different parts of the world and the ability to evade testing. Equally, WADA has long argued that the importance of unannounced out-of-competition testing to preventing doping outweighs the perceived limitations of the policy. This chapter provides a review of previous research examining the whereabouts system, before analysing events that have stimulated debate about the policy’s legitimacy. The chapter concludes that WADA has relied on controlling individual and organisational access to Olympic competition to manage challenges, but a suitable alternative policy is yet to be offered.
