Category: Doping in sports

Whooped

In 2022, we noted a discussion by Julia Powles and Toby Walsh, summarized here, that warned about the increasing collection of data about elite athletes. The data, they said, does not flow to the sports scientists who really can help athletes perform better and minimize their risk of injury, but to data scientists and data crunchers. The money could be better spent on healthier environments and financial support. Powles, with Jacqueline Alderson, followed up in 2023 with best practice principles.

Cue tennis. At this year’s Australian Open, which concluded on February 1, eventual men’s singles champion Carlos Alcaraz, women’s singles finalist Aryna Sabalenka, and men’s singles semifinalist Jannik Sinner were all told to remove their Whoop tracker devices before playing early-round matches.

An important part of this story is the ridiculously convoluted nature of tennis politics. The International Tennis Federation runs lower-level tournaments and junior events; the Grand Slams are laws unto themselves; the men’s and women’s pro tours are run by the ATP and WTA respectively. That’s seven powers – without the national tennis federations or the national and international anti-doping edifice.

The players were caught between conflicting decisions. In mid-December, the ITF approved Whoop devices in competition as long as haptic feedback is disabled, adding it to its list of permitted “Player Analysis Technology” devices. On a Whoop, “haptic feedback” means the device vibrates to alert you to…something.

The ITF published its detailed examination (see also a wearer’s review by Emilie Lavinia at The Independent). Whoop’s array of sensors can capture: heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep stages and performance, recovery, activity strain metrics, blood oxygenation (SpO2), skin temperature, respiratory rate, and blood pressure (only some models), and perform on-demand ECG and irregular heart rhythm notification (only some regions, where it’s approved). As the ITF notes, data capture takes place automatically whenever the athlete is wearing the device. Players are allowed to charge the device on-court using its battery pack.

So far, so good. Turning off haptic feedback requires the player to disable alarms, turn off the “Strength Trainer” screens; and turn off “Strain Target” if they want to use “Live Activity” mode. The player has to show tournament officials on request that their settings are compliant (or that they’re using the Whoop 3.0, which has no haptic feedback).

The device has no screen; viewing the data requires an Android or iOS device, the app, paired via Bluetooth, and a subscription. This is the Gillette razor, or “free puppy” business model: the device is free, you pay for ongoing access to your own data.

So basically, the ITF is allowing players to collect data using the Whoop device for future inspection and discussion with their teams, as long as it doesn’t vibrate on their wrist. The key here is the potential for the device to be a conduit for an automated form of in-match coaching; the definition of PAT devices given in Appendix III of the ITF’s Rules of Tennis (PDF) specifically directs readers to Rule 30, which covers coaching.

For most of tennis’s Open Era – basically since 1968, when the sport went professional – coaching from the stands was banned. The original argument in favor of the ban was that tennis was and is a highly unequal sport. Top players can afford any assistance they want. The lowest-ranked players scrounge, as Irish player Conor Niland, who topped out at 129 in the world, recounts in a Guardian interview and in his excellent 2024 book, The Racket. Until the 1990s, even mid-range players often toured alone. Therefore, allowing coaching from the stands during matches threatened to make the playing field even more unequal.

As money flowed into tennis, the numbers who could afford traveling coaches rose and the no-coaching rule was increasingly flouted. Following a series of trials, the WTA began allowing coaching in 2022. The ATP, the ITF, and the Grand Slams finally began allowing it in 2025. Rule 30 leaves it open for events’ governing bodies to prohibit it.

The Whoop controversy digitizes all this baggage. Rule 30 differentiates between off-court coaching (coaching from the stands), which is permitted, and on-court coaching, which is only permitted during specific team events. Ordinary watches are allowed, but smart watches and mobile phones are banned because they are capable of communications, Teresa Merklin explains at Fiend at Court.

“We have coaching. why can’t you have your own data?” former champion Todd Woodbridge asked on TV.

We are still at the beginning of these technologies and their controversies. Merklin digs up a forgotten incident: in 2013, Wimbledon shot down Bethanie Mattek-Sands’ query about wearing Google Glass. Devices will keep shrinking and becoming harder to spot.

Unlike in the past, however, PATs are cheap compared to hiring traveling personnel. While Powles and Walsh were undoubtedly right that data analysis is no substitute for physiologists’ and sports scientists’ expertise, PATs might give lower-ranked players previously unaffordable insight. Given the increasing heat stress at many tournaments, feedback that warns when your body is overstressed seems like a good idea. On the other hand, can you imagine how much bettors would love to have access to this kind of data in real time?

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Dethroned

This is a version of a paper that Jon Crowcroft and I delivered at this week’s gikii conference.

She sounded shocked. But also: as though the word she had to pronounce in front of the world’s press was one she had never encountered before and needed to take care to get right. Stan-o-zo-lol. It was 1988, and the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had tested positive for it. It was two days, after he had won the gold medal in the 100m men’s race at the Seoul Olympics.

In the years since, that race has become known as the dirtiest race in history. Of the top eight finishers, just one has never been caught doping: US runner Calvin Smith, who was awarded the bronze medal after Johnson was disqualified.

Doping controls were in their infancy then. As athletes and their coaches and doctors moved on from steroids to EPO and human growth hormone, anti-doping scientists, always trailing behind, developed new tests. Recognizing that in-competition testing didn’t catch athletes during training, when doping regimens are most useful, the authorities began testing outside of competiton, which in 2004 in turn spawned the “whereabouts” system athletes must use to tell testers where they’re going to be for one hour of every day. Athlete biological passports came into use in 2008 to track blood markers over time and monitor for suspicious changes brought by drugs yet to have tests.

The plan was for the 2012 London Olympics to be the cleanest ever staged. Scientists built a lab; they showed off new techniques to the press. Afterwards, they took bows. In a report published in October 2012, independent observers wrote, the organizers “successfully implemented measures to protect the rights of clean athletes”. The report found only eight out of more than 5,000 samples tested positive during the games. Success?

It is against this background that in 2014 the German TV channel MDR, whose journalist Hajo Seppelt specializes in doping investigations, aired the Icarus, Grigory Rodchenkov, former director of Moscow’s doping control lab, spilled the story of swapped samples and covered-up tests. And 2012? Rodchenkov called it the dirtiest Olympics in history. The UK’s anti-doping lab, he said, missed 126 positive tests.

In April, Esther Addley reported in the Guardian that “the dirtiest race in history” has a new contender: the women’s 1500 meter race at the 2012 London Olympics.

In the runup to 2012, the World Anti-Doping Agency decided to check their work. They arranged to keep athletes’ samples, frozen, for eight years so they could be rested later as dope-testing science improved and expanded. In 2016, reanalysis of 265 samples across five sports from athletes who might participate in the 2016 Rio games found banned substances in samples relating to 23 athletes.

That turned out to be only the beginning. In the years since, athlete after athlete in that race have had their historical results overturned as a result of abnormalities in their biological passports. Just last year – 2024! – one more athlete was disqualified from that race after her frozen sample tested positive for steroids.

The official medal list now awards gold to Maryam Yusuf Jamal (originally the bronze medalist); silver to Abeba Aregawi (upgraded from fifth place to bronze, and then to silver); and bronze to Shannon Rowbury, the sixth-place finisher. Is retroactive fairness possible?

In our gikii paper, Jon Crowcroft and I think not. The original medalists have lost their places in the rolls of honor, but they’ve had a varying number of years to exploit their results while they stood. They got the medal ceremony while in the flush of triumph, the national kudos, and the financial and personal opportunities that go with it.

In addition, Crowcroft emphasizes that runners strategize. You run a race very differently depending on who your competitors are and what you know about how they run. Jamal, Aragawi, and Rowbury would have faced a very different opposition both before and during the final had the anti-doping system worked as it was supposed to, with unpredictable results.

The anti-doping system is essentially a security system, intended to permit some behaviors and elminate others. Many points of failure are obvious simply from analyzing misplaced incentives. some substances can’t be detected, which WADA recognizes by barring methods as well as substances. Some that can be are overlooked – see, for example, meldonium, which was used by hundreds of Eastern European athletes for a decade or more before WADA banned it. More, it is fundamentally unfair to look at athletes as independent agents of their own destinies. They are the linchpins of ecosystems that include coaches trainers, doctors, nutritionists, family members, agents, managers, sponsors, and national and international sporting bodies.

In a 2006 article, Bruce Schneier muses on a different unfairness: that years later athletes have less ability to contest findings, as they can’t be retested. That’s partly true. In many cases, athletes can’t be retested even a day later. Instead, their samples are divided into two. The “B”sample is tested for confirmation if the “A” sample produces an adverse analytical finding.

If you want to ban doping, or find out who was using what and when, retrospective testing is a valuable tool. It can certainly bring a measure of peace and satisfaction to the athletes who felt cheated. But it doesn’t bring fairness.

Illustrations: The three top finishers on the day of the women’s 1500 meter race at the 2012 Olympics; on the right is Maryam Yusuf Jamal, later promoted to gold medal.

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.