Ed Warner: Tale of Tyson Fury shows obstacles faced by anti-doping chiefs

On Saturday either Tyson Fury or Oleksandr Usyk will be the first men’s undisputed heavyweight world champion since Lennox Lewis was stripped of his WBA title in 2000. 

Fury has come a long way from his two-year ban for a failed anti-doping test he blamed on eating uncastrated wild boar. 

While the boxer is still some way off national treasure status, his public appeal has blossomed. Britain’s anti-doping agency, by contrast, has appeared to shrink in stature since the Fury case was settled in 2018.

The dispute between UK Anti-Doping and Tyson Fury was lengthier and more expensive than most cases, but then rarely does UKAD find itself pursuing an athlete in such a lucrative sport as top-end professional boxing. 

It cost the agency £577,717 in legal bills plus a few thousand pounds in laboratory fees. At the time UKAD’s annual expenditure was just £10.2m, so highlighting the unequal odds in the battle for clean sport.

“If you told Tyson Fury he’s set to make $100m, he’d really get p***ed off because he thinks, and I think he’s right, that he’s going to make a lot more. I don’t know the number, but it’s a lot more than $100m.” Promoter Bob Arum on the purse for Saturday’s fight, as reported in the Independent

Over recent years UKAD’s annual spend on drugs testing, education about clean sport, investigations and prosecution of cases has grown to £14m. In the last reported year, to March 2023, it conducted 10,905 tests across 47 sports and resolved 21 anti-doping rule violation cases. Of these, eight were what UKAD describes as “intelligence led”.

Intelligence is the Holy Grail for anti-doping authorities. Accurate tip-offs from within sport allow cash-poor agencies to target their resources in chasing cheats, rather than relying on the scatterguns of education and general testing of athletes.

Smart cheats should never be caught by a drugs tester during a competition – they know the odds of being tested then are far higher – and there are so many athletes and comparatively few tests that the chances of being caught off season are slim. But if a fellow athlete or coach dobs you in to the authorities…

(This week happens to be UKAD’s annual Clean Sport Week. This year it is themed ‘Journey to the Podium’. Details here.)

UKAD’s perennial challenge has been the lack of resources available to it. Within its limited funds the agency has chosen to devote very little to dedicated investigative staff.

Last year it spent the grand total of £533k on its “Intelligence and Investigations” programme; £421k on people and the remaining £112k on direct costs. That’s less than the legal bill it ran up in the Tyson Fury case. Eight resolved intelligence-led cases doesn’t seem so bad on that skinny budget.

I’m all for education and targeted testing of athletes, but World Athletics’ initiative in establishing a well-funded Athletics Integrity Unit and the US Anti-Doping Agency’s noisy pursuit of suspected miscreants both show the value of hefty resources devoted to investigative work.

As one journalist said to me the other day, UKAD hasn’t unearthed a single high-profile cheat recently and he doesn’t take that as an indication that British sport is free of doping.

Travis Tygart, chief executive of USADA, is an outlier in the world of anti-doping. To some he’s a grandstanding publicity-seeker, but to many he’s an Eliot Ness figure making the world of sport a cleaner place for all our pleasures.

The problem national anti-doping agencies face is that their public paymasters rarely champion such crusading – especially as the agencies operate under the global umbrella of WADA, which itself hardly has a reputation as a firebrand.

If you want evidence of Tygart and USADA’s style, and how it jars with WADA’s, look no further than the current furore about the 23 Chinese swimmers cleared to compete in the Tokyo Olympics in spite of failed tests for a banned drug.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, Tygart has publicly taken WADA to task and stung the agency into an unusually public defence of its actions. He’s done swimmers and fans of the sport a service in the process.

It might be asking too much of UKAD to enter a phone box and come out in Superman cape and underpants, but it could embrace a shift in strategy to prioritise both a far greater focus of resources on investigative activity and a policy shouting louder on doping issues worldwide.

As to funding, £14m is far too little for the nation’s sporting stakeholders to spend on maintaining the integrity of sports events held in the UK as well as Britain’s athletes who compete around the world. One hopes (in vain?) that politicians care enough to hear a well-argued case for more resources, but are rights holders in wealthy sports themselves prepared to contribute?

Too often you hear major team sports claim they have no doping problems. But are they – is anyone – really digging deeply enough in the right places?

(You can read the joint 2017 statement from UKAD, Tyson Fury and Hughie Fury after each party “accepted a compromise of its position” here. The link to the full decision on the case at the bottom of the statement is no longer working.)

Fool’s gold

Regular readers will know I’m no gambler, but I’ve been idly surfing betting websites with my recent coulmn on the relative prospects of the French and British teams at the upcoming Olympics bouncing around in my brain. To remind you, analysts at Gracenote forecast French golds to boom from 10 in Tokyo to 28 in Paris and Team GB’s to slump from 22 to 13.

I’d say both projections are well out. Remember, British cyclists always hide their technological advantage away from the Games. I’m just waiting for them to get off their mid-cycle penny-farthings, kick off their flip-flops, peel on their latest racing suits and clip their cleats into the pedals of their current generation bikes.

That alone should eat a big chunk out of Gracenote’s golds forecast while a slew of Brits deliver in other sports.

One betting site currently has GB with odds of 3/4 to win more than 15.5 golds (19/20 to win fewer) and France 3/4 to win fewer than 23.5 (19/20 to win more). I may just have to break my golden rule not to bet on sport outside the Grand National.

Where’s the refund queue?

Northampton Saints 90-0 Gloucester Rugby. “We’ve all been on the end of those sort of games,” was a very collegiate reflection from the Saints’ director of rugby.

His opposite number had chosen to field an inexperienced side ahead of his club’s appearance in next Friday’s Challenge Cup final at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Any in the 15,249 crowd who paid good money to watch the shellacking at Franklin’s Gardens on Saturday might fancy asking for a refund. Can’t have been a great afternoon for fans of either side. I guess Gloucester has given the final a welcome publicity boost though. 

Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com