Wada lost track of test results before Olympics

Just weeks before the Paris Olympics, officials at the headquarters of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) received some startling news.

Lawyers for the organization told a meeting of top officials in late May that a series of problems with its databases had led to corrupted, missing or incorrect data related to at least 2,000 cases and, as a result, the agency had even lost track of more than 900 test results from athletes who had been accused of breaking anti-doping rules.

That stunning revelation came with another unsettling disclosure: Because of the data problems, the agency could no longer determine which cases it should be monitoring, and its lawyers were now unsure if its staff were properly tracking cases of athletes who might soon be heading to Paris.

“The more we dig,” the lawyers admitted in a PowerPoint presentation used at the meeting, “the more we find.”

The previously undisclosed account of the meeting raises serious new questions about the performance of the agency, which has come under intense scrutiny in 2024 for its handling of possible doping in swimming.

The scale of the data problems deepened concerns inside the organization about its capacity to stay on top of its expanding workload.

Some officials, including several lawyers, were alarmed at the possibility that the shortcomings in the agency’s system could have allowed athletes who were under investigation for doping to slip through its net and participate in the Olympics. And hanging over the episode was fear that it could provide more ammunition to outside critics who say that Wada is failing in its core mission of policing the use of banned performance-enhancing substances in global sports.

Until now, knowledge of the vast number of cases affected by the data problems has been a closely guarded secret, limited to the handful of Wada officials directly involved in addressing the crisis. Senior leaders have kept many of the important details from athletes, the public and members of Wada’s executive board.