Dear colleagues,
On behalf of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), we would like to wish you all a very happy New Year; and we hope that, like us, you are feeling energized and optimistic for 2025.
Before we forge ahead, we would like to take a moment to thank you all—our partners in clean sport—for your ongoing support and dedication, and to highlight below some of the achievements that we delivered together in 2024 in line with the priorities of WADA’s 2020-2024 Strategic Plan.
- To further strengthen our ability to lead, we:
- continued to invest heavily in anti-doping research, allocating roughly 10% of our budget to scientific and social science research;
- strengthened our collaboration with the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Association, especially as it pertains to developing detection methods and strengthening the Therapeutic Use Exemption program; and
- created the following new Impact Areas, which will help us deliver on our 2025-2029 Strategic Plan that will be published in the coming weeks:
- Digital Insights: To better leverage data and strategically develop our digital assets, which will help us deliver insights to improve the effectiveness of the global anti-doping system; and
- Engagement & Development: To consolidate our engagement and development strategies through greater coordination and the use of insights to identify priority activities and regions.
- To grow impact, we:
- continued to bolster the intelligence and investigations (I&I) capacity of the global anti-doping system through the success of the European Union (EU)-funded Capability and Capacity Building project. This led to more than 80 joint operations, resulting in significant seizures of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and the dismantling of numerous illicit laboratories — effectively preventing more than 400 million PED doses from entering the global market;
- published data from Phase I of the Anti-Doping Organization (ADO) Benchmarking Project, which aims to help ADOs measure their activity in context;
- hosted our inaugural Social Science Research Symposium, followed by our 2024 Global Education Conference in Cannes, France, which we delivered in partnership with France’s ADO, l’Agence française de lutte contre le dopage (AFLD).
- To support our commitment to be athlete centered, our Athlete Engagement team worked closely with WADA’s Athlete Council on several initiatives, including:
- the Athletes’ Anti-Doping Ombuds that, in September, was approved to continue as an ongoing program;
- continued development of the Human Rights Impact Assessment; and
- promoting clean sport directly with the athletes, via athlete-led teams, on the ground of five major events on four continents, including the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, France.
- To be visible and raise awareness of the positive impact of doping-free sport and WADA’s role, we:
- ran our Annual Play True Day campaign, which generated nearly 200 million impressions (potential views) and 260,000 engagements (likes, shares, etc.) on social media worldwide; and
- carried out the ‘Natural is Enough’ awareness campaign in connection with the EU I&I project mentioned above, which focused on the increasing threat of youth steroid use. The campaign achieved 13 million impressions and 208,000 engagements on social media.
- To deliver on our priority to collaborate and unite, we:
- organized many bilateral meetings and regional forums between WADA Leadership and leaders from Governments and the Sport Movement;
- convened more than 1,100 participants from the global anti-doping community for our 2024 Annual Symposium, which included a 25th Anniversary gala—an opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of the global anti-doping community and some of its key contributors; and
- progressed the 2027 World Anti-Doping Code (Code) and International Standards Update Process, which will culminate with approval during the World Conference on Doping in Sport that is to be held in Busan, Republic of Korea, in December 2025.
While we are proud of all that we accomplished together in 2024, as many of you would know, this past year was also significantly disrupted by the China Anti-Doping Agency no-fault contamination cases involving 23 swimmers from China that emerged in April and that WADA responded to quickly and thoroughly. By July, a review had been carried out by an Independent Prosecutor, Mr. Eric Cottier, which determined that WADA showed no bias towards China and that the Agency’s decision not to appeal the cases to the Court of Arbitration for Sport was reasonable based on the evidence. The Cottier Report also made it apparent that the cases presented an opportunity to make improvements, both to the anti-doping rules and the systems and processes that support application of those rules. Accordingly, in September, WADA’s Executive Committee (ExCo) established a Working Group tasked with turning the observations of Mr. Cottier, and those of the Anti-Doping Audit Review Committee of World Aquatics on the same topic, into concrete recommendations that could be reviewed and approved by the ExCo. We are pleased to say that, in early December, the ExCo unanimously approved the Working Group’s recommendations, which means that we are starting 2025 with a clear roadmap that, in conjunction with the 2027 Code and Standards Update Process mentioned above, will result in significant improvements to the global anti-doping system.
It’s hard to believe that just twelve months from now, we will convene in Busan for the sixth World Conference since WADA’s founding in 1999. As an anti-doping community, we can be proud of all that has been accomplished since then. Yet, as we all know, there is still much more to be done to deliver on our global collaborative movement for doping-free sport. Our collective success will safeguard the integrity of sport and the efforts of clean athletes. As we embark on the new year, we have great optimism and confidence in the community’s ability to collaborate and go further together.
Sincerely,
Witold Bańka Olivier Niggli
President Director General
Message taken from WADA.
