IOC calls for major 2017 anti-doping summit

The IOC wants the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to take control of drug testing in all sports, thereby removing national federations from a process that has been corrupted in many countries.

nternational Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach gives a news conference after the Olympic Summit on doping in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The International Olympic Committee will call for a special summit on doping to be convened next year as part of its effort to purge drug cheats from sport, it said on Tuesday.

The IOC wants the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to take control of drug testing in all sports, thereby removing national federations from a process that has been corrupted in many countries.

The IOC will ask WADA “to convene an ‘Extraordinary World Conference on Doping’ in 2017”, Olympic executives said in a statement issued after a special summit aimed at keeping drug cheats out of the Games in Rio de Janeiro, which starts on August 5.

Another summit in October will help define the objectives for the WADA conference, the IOC said. One goal will be “to make the entire anti-doping system independent from sports organisations.”

The call follows revelations by the IOC that doping systems in Russia and Kenya have been so thoroughly corrupted that drug tests in those countries can no longer be trusted.

Broadly, Bach said that IOC leaders have concluded that “the (global) anti-doping system has some deficiencies (and) has to be more transparent.”