The United States refuses to pay its financial contribution to the functioning of the world anti-doping agency

The announcement is a new step in the standoff between the United States and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The American Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) announced on Wednesday January 8 that it was withholding its contribution to the operation of WADA for 2024, i.e. $3.6 million. A decision welcomed in a press release by the American Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which sees “the only one [mesure] possible to protect the rights of athletes and fair competition”.

The current dispute between the United States and WADA dates back to spring 2024, after revelations from New York Times and the German channel ARD concerning twenty-three Chinese swimmers who tested positive for trimetazidine before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, but who had not been suspended or sanctioned by the body.

USADA boss Travis Tygart, already a virulent critic of WADA’s handling of the Russian doping cases revealed in 2015-2016, has for months accused the organization based in Montreal, Canada, of having “allowed China to slip positive cases under the rug”. The anti-doping policeman, for his part, insists that he has committed no fault in accepting the thesis put forward by the Chinese authorities of a “food contamination” occurrence in a hotel where the swimmers had stayed, and considers the subject closed since a report from Swiss prosecutor Eric Cottier, whom WADA commissioned, estimated that she had worked “autonomously, independently and professionally”.

The president of the AMA, the Pole Witold Banka, regretted, in December, to Agence France-Presse (AFP), the “politicization” of this matter by the United States and the “very unfair and defamatory attacks against” of its authority.

Leading contributing country

For Mr. Tygart, however, the leaders of the AMA did not respond to requests “reasonable” of its organization, including the establishment of a “independent audit” of its operations. Non-payment of the 2024 contribution of the United States “will have no impact on the right of American athletes to compete”in the country and internationally, says USADA.

WADA, whose 2025 budget amounts to $57.5 million, confirmed on Wednesday that it had not received American participation for 2024. However, the United States is by far the first contributing country to the world policeman of the anti-doping, financed half by governments and half by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Asked by AFP, the IOC estimated that it “this was a matter between WADA and public authorities as stakeholders” of the anti-doping system. The association representing the summer Olympic federations (ASOIF) declined any comment, and its winter counterpart (WOF) did not react. But last year, the three authorities strongly condemned the launching by the American justice system, at the beginning of July, of an investigation led by the FBI into WADA’s management of the case of the twenty-three Chinese swimmers.

This investigation is based on the Rodchenkov Act, promulgated at the end of 2020 by the President of the United States Donald Trump during his first term, by which the United States granted itself extraterritorial jurisdiction in matters of doping.

“Can you imagine what the American reaction would be if Chinese security forces investigated American athletes? »asks AFP Michael Payne, the former IOC marketing director. For him, the United States “appear to be deliberately trying to inflame the problem”a new example “the growing political instrumentalization of sport”. However, for many players in the field, the risk is to weaken WADA, created in 1999 in the wake of the Festina affair in cycling, to develop the world anti-doping code and allow a coherent fight according to sports and countries.