Banned blood booster a challenge for anti-doping authorities - expert

BOURG EN BRESSE, France : An anti-anaemia drug is making the fight against doping much harder, a top Swiss expert said on Thursday, although he added that there was currently no miracle product on the testers' radar.

Raphael Faiss, the Research Manager at the Centre for Research and Expertise in Anti-Doping sciences at the University of Lausanne, said that banned drug roxadustat represented a tough challenge for anti-doping authorities.

"(Roxadustat) is not new, it's been around since the early 2010s but available in the market only in Asia,' Faiss told Reuters.

"It stimulates your body like it is in altitude, and stimulates the upstream of red blood cells, promoting endogenous erythropoietin (EPO)."

Roxadustat, which has been detectable since 2017, has an elimination half-life of 10-16 hours, making it hard for the anti-doping controllers to catch potential cheats.

Former Wimbledon and French Open tennis champion Simona Halep has been provisionally suspended since October 2022 after testing positive for roxadustat at the U.S. Open last year. Halep has strongly denied knowingly taking the banned substance.

Faiss said that athletes who repeatedly train in altitude camps for only a few days aroused suspicions, as they were hard to test.

According to the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) whereabouts rules, athletes must communicate a 60-minute time slot for each day when they will be available and accessible for testing and are liable for potential ‘missed tests’.

They also must provide anti-doping authorities with their home address as well as the location and time of their training activities.

"It is hard to test athletes when they train in altitude as they may only be accessible by cable cars - which may not run at night," Faiss