The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been aggressively pursuing a policy to eliminate the spread of steroids and performance enhancing drugs across the world with its Operation Upstream since 2022. In these efforts, its Director of Intelligence and Investigations (I&I), Gunter Younger, has been the key figure behind the project’s success.
According to WADA’s own admission, the operation under its Global Anti-Doping Intelligence and Investigations Network (GAIIN) initiative has so far managed to dismantle 88 illicit laboratories and seize almost 90 tons of performance-enhancing drugs – or 1.8 billion doses – involving more than 20 countries and several law-enforcement agencies including the INTERPOL and Europol.
Younger spoke to Sportstar on a range of subjects on the sidelines of the GAIIN conference in New Delhi.
Excerpts:
Q: If we purely look at the Indian context, there are always athletes that get caught and are penalised. However, there is never a deterrence or action against the coaches who actually supply the Performance Enhancing Drugs substances. Is the WADA looking at bringing the coaches and officials also into the ambit of investigations?
A: Yes. It’s been a concern for many years on how to get to the coaches and the doctors involved. The issue we have is that we focus on the athletes, test them. If they test positive, we have a voluntary interview and that’s all we can do. The athlete is actually the victim of the system. The only way to change that is not to go from bottom up. We want a top down impact. We now target the supply chains because the doctors and the coaches need to get the PEDs somewhere. And then we go down and target the coaches, the doctors and protect the athletes, because that is our ultimate goal.
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Q: A cynic would say, if at all an athlete does dope, at least there should be commensurate results to justify it. But India is a strange paradox because despite topping the doping charts repeatedly, there is little by way of sporting achievements. How do you look at this?
A: The thing is, there are two categories of athletes who dope and we have to distinguish between them. One who come into the doping net because of using a contaminated supplement or substance that they are not aware of. There are a lot of reasons, it’s not intentional. These are the ones we would address first through education. That’s always a pity and these are not the ones we want to target. Countries which have a strong education programme have less of these kinds of cases.
I think a big issue in India is education. You have 22 languages, it’s very complex and I think this is where you need to improve and we want to help. The second type is the sophisticated doper. These are far more high-level, far more advanced, and these are usually the ones hard to get. These are the ones we want to target.
Q: It will always be tempting for officials to look for shortcuts. There’ll always be those more interested in protecting the offenders because it gives them short term results. In such a scenario, can you explain WADA’s working and equations with the different agencies, not just the National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs) but others as well, whether it’s the enforcement agencies or the different sports federations?
A: Many international federations now have relations or partnerships with the International Testing Agency, which gives them the independence of testing programmes. It also protects the federations from being accused of perhaps protecting their elite athletes because yes, it’s a conflict. So I think we’re going the right way. And we are also trying, from the other side, through the NADOs, because an athlete can be tested both by a NADO and an international federation. On one hand, they cannot just protect the athletes because the NADO might test them as well. I think the most important way to avoid this conflict is to have a multi-faceted testing process.
The most dangerous part is always the perception. For example, in the case of the Chinese swimmers a few years ago, we from the I&I are focusing on facts. It was clear from our side that it was a contamination case. It was not something they wanted to protect. So we always have to be careful.
We are not naive. If there are any issues or suspicions, we will go after every country, as we did with Russia.
Q: Every time there’s talk of doping and performance enhancing, talk veers around to the Enhanced Games. How do you look at it?
A: That’s always the ultimate question. Should we let everyone dope? My counter question would be, which age do we start? Do you want a 12-year-old to get doped? Eight-year-old? But for cheaters, it’s in their nature. If you start with 12, they will start doping with nine and eight. I think that’s not the solution. We are completely against it because sport is not just about the elite athletes. Sport is what we are as a society. And we are categorically against any kind of approval or legal recognition for something like that.
Q: With increased advancements in testing, is there a trade-off to be made between correcting the violations of the past and protecting the future?
A: It’s an interesting question because when you look at our sophisticated dopers, they know how to bypass the rules. They use methods and substances that are not known, it’s not always easy to be ahead of these guys because they know exactly what we’re looking for. So this is why we from the I&I are big supporters of long-term storage of samples. Not just because we can catch those dopers a couple of years later. Sometimes it’s painful, especially for the athletes, like with the Russians, after 10 years, they get their medals back.
But information isn’t always available. Methods of detecting substances is getting better and better. We use them to not only catch the dopers who weren’t detected earlier but also to calibrate the systems in a way that we can detect these kind of things in the future. From an I&I point of view, we push back as much as we can. It’s a circle. Of course, there’s a statute of limitations after 10 years but we try to be better for the future.
Published on Apr 16, 2026
