In the first of a new video interview series called “WADA Talks”, accessible via the agency’s YouTube channel, Sir Craig is asked for his key priorities, and responds: “I want to see the wish that many of our stakeholders have expressed that having written a new Code we now try to make sure that everybody not only adheres to it but tries to make their anti-doping efforts better.

“So I think the independent compliance group that we have established have a big part to play in that.

“I mean I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh yes, we have written a set of rules, we have ticked the box, we are WADA-compliant, we don’t need to worry about it’.

“We need them to be more efficient; we need NADOs to be efficient and we need the IFs to be efficient.

“At the top end of sport with the IFs, I want them all to begin to look at the technical document on specific sports analysis.

“Let’s test athletes for the substances which are most likely to be abused in their sport.

“Let’s make their testing distribution plans and their systems more efficient and that I think should help their compliance.”

His comments come as a new report on anti-doping rule violations has exposed an enormous spread in the adverse analytical finding (AAF)-to-sample rates recorded by individual NADOs in 2013.

Some, such as Cuba, Germany and Japan, had AAF-to-sample rates of below 0.2 per cent; others, such as Turkey, Mexico and Kuwait, of above nine per cent.

Sir Craig also commented on the challenge of keeping up with current trends and expressed concern with “countries where winning a major sports event results in a prize of such huge importance that people persuade the athletes to dope”.

He highlighted the close to $70 million (£44.5 million/€63 million) invested in scientific research since WADA’s foundation and described a new more than $12 million (£8 million/€11 million) special research fund to which national Governments have made commitments of well over $6 million (£4 million/€5 million) as “helpful”.

“We need to find new methods, we need to find better ways of doing this, to see if we can make it faster, to see if we can make it cheaper, to see if we can make it more effective,” he said.


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