LAUSANNE, 30 January 2004 — International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge called on governments yesterday to fulfill their financial obligations to the international fight against doping by paying their dues to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

“I repeat my appeal to say that governments must pay their dues,” Rogge said at the start of a one-day WADA media symposium on doping at the Olympic museum in Lausanne.

The independent Montreal-based body, set up in 1999, is funded jointly by the Olympic movement and national governments. WADA president Dick Pound told the symposium said the organization had received only about 25 percent of its agreed funding for 2003.

“WADA is doing this in difficult circumstances,” Rogge said. “WADA is doing this with a limited budget.”

Rogge welcomed the decision by the international world soccer governing body FIFA on Wednesday to sign the WADA anti-doping code. The International Cycling Union is the only major Olympic sporting body yet to sign the code, which provides for uniform two-year suspensions for serious doping offence.

“I think it is a very important sign and it strengthens and reinforces the position of the International Olympic Committee that says there is no place in the Games for those who don’t want to support the WADA anti-doping convention,” Rogge said.

The IOC leader also praised the statement by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address saying the use of steroids in American sports was dangerous and sent the wrong message.

Pound said 87 percent of Olympic and other recognized sporting federations had accepted the WADA code, which was agreed at a meeting in Copenhagen last March.

He said all sports federations were expected to sign in time for the Athens Olympics in August and all governments by the 2006 Turin Winter Games.

WADA director general David Howman emphasized the code was flexible and provided for individual federations to vary the sanction according to the offence.

He said WADA would have the right to challenge any decision by an individual federation at the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

The symposium is being held at the end of a difficult month for the IOC, with high-profile drugs cases in four Olympic sports, notably in athletics, the central sport of the Games.

Britain’s European 100 meters champion Dwain Chambers is one of five track and field athletes who has tested positive for the new designer steroid THG (tetrahydrogestrinone) while several others, including American double world sprint champion Kelli White, have tested positive for the stimulant modafinil. Howman said there had been a “huge mindshift” in the attitudes of testers after the discovery of THG last year.