Kayaking / Anti Doping

People seem to be happy to talk about drugs in athletics and cycling these days, people like Gatlin get derided and left out in the cold and people refuse to forgive them for their failed drug tests in the past. Anyone winning the tour de France is given some healthy suspicion. The competitors and governing bodies of these sports point to their drugs testing programs, which without a doubt are making big improvements, alongside WADA. Improvements include the biological passport, increased awareness and media pressure and new more sophisticated tests, which all make it harder to cheat. But what about canoeing? What are we doing? Canoeing is a smaller sport with less of a media spotlight, despite its presence in the Olympics, but little is ever mentioned about testing and drugs within the sport.

Clearly we all want a clean and fair sport for everyone to enjoy, but in order to get that everyone needs to be engaged. There isn't a huge amount of testing within canoe / kayak, especially within certain disciplines, and a lot of the time there isn't much discussion about the potential that there could be athletes who aren't clean. It's taboo to suggest that the sport isn't perfect, but doing so isn't to cast aspersions on individuals, it is merely to point out that more can always be done to keep drugs out.