JEDDAH, 29 January 2008 — The Saudi anti-doping chief said proper procedures must be in place to ensure effective and credible doping tests on athletes.

“World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) must not allow a country to supervise the doping tests on athletes unless they are qualified and accept to have WADA representatives monitor the process,” said Bader Al-Saeed, general secretary of the Saudi Arabian Anti-Doping Committee (SAADC).

This, Al-Saeed said, is to ensure the process runs smoothly and accurately especially when new rules and regulations are implemented and the information has to be passed on to all delegations in the sporting event properly.

He said WADA doping control officers (DCO) had been posted at the 15th Asian Games Qatar, West Asian Championship, and the 2nd Indoor Games in Macau. “This made it clear nothing would go wrong and was for the good of all,” he said.

“However, during the 11th Pan Arab Games last November it was chaos all the way,” he said. More than 90 percent of the procedures and forms distributed among the athletes and officials did not follow the WADA standards.

To begin with, the event organizing committee did not distribute any rules, regulation or explained the process the athlete would undergo when asked for tests, he said. They did not also mention which laboratory the tests would be sent to. “I had to request that myself after meeting with the anti-doping committee president in Egypt Dr. Husni Abdulrahman a few days before the event kicked off,” he said.

They had informed Al-Saeed, the tests would be sent to Barcelona accredited laboratory, and that the tests would run after each competition immediately. In addition, in individual events the tests would be limited to the gold medalists, while in team events only the players from teams who reach the finals would be tested.

“That was not it,” Al-Saeed said,” regardless of our concern to know everything we were surprised with the disorganization and lack of cooperation in many things.”

Al-Saeed said mistakes by the Egyptian organizing committee caused confusion among the athletes. He said, when the athletes were requested to do the test, they were supposed to have a doping-control officer (DCO) from their country accompanying them. In Egypt, they had a new form and gave it to the athlete to sign, and many did. “It is not right. The DCO from the athlete’s country should sign it instead but the athletes were not aware of the new forms, and the Egyptian doping control team did not too,” he said.

Hence, according to Hassan Abdulrahman, general manager at the medical center for the 11th Pan Arab Games, he said all the tests sent to WADA came back negative making this championship the first Arab Games without any positive doping result despite having the highest number of tests sent. He also said the clinics where the tests took place would not be able to function during the Youth World Cup which Egypt will hosts in 2009. This is because according to the WADA, to run this, the clinic must at least test more that 1, 500 athletes and it is hard to do so during the remaining period of time. The tests sent from the Arab Games event to Barcelona’s accredited test center reached only 314.

However, rumors spread during the Arab Games that several athletes tested positive. Arab News had e-mailed WADA to shed light on the matter without success.

According to official source from the Arab Federation of Weightlifting (AFW), two Wada representatives had arrived to supervise the process only to leave after being told not to conduct doping tests by the organizing committee.