EOSE and WADA – Continuing the Journey to Professionalise the Global Anti-Doping Workforce
From the end of July onwards, the eyes of the world will be on the Paris Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. This will be a great festival of sport, and we are all looking forward to seeing the finest athletes competing on the world stage, winning medals and being even ‘Faster, Higher and Stronger’ – hopefully without the help of banned substances and methods.
Unfortunately, we have to remind ourselves that doping continues to be a basic threat to fair competition. Our amazing athletes can only perform in a doping-free environment thanks to the help of many ‘unsung heros’ constantly working in the background at and beween events. They are the practitioners in anti-doping organisations and the sport movement who work tirelessly to promote and protect clean sport at every level. If all goes well in Paris, you will hear very little about them, but their efforts in maintaining the integrity and values of sport are vital.
Over the past 25 years, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), has made great strides in creating a harmonised approach to anti-doping which is increasingly effective. A further important step for WADA is to create a Global Learning and Development Framework (GLDF) which will harmonise the training and development of anti-doping practitioners worldwide, establishing professional standards and blended learning courses for the workforce, together with online training needs analysis and training evaluation tools. These valuable outputs will improve practitioners’ competence even further, raise their professional status and enhance the effectiveness of themselves and the organisations they work for. Overall, anti-doping itself will become ‘Faster, Higher and Stronger’.
This is why in 2022 WADA chose EOSE as the lead partner and coordinator in a three-year Erasmus+ Sport project, GLDF4CleanSport, which gathers five European national anti-doping agencies and two international federations as partners.
Project Progress
The project has just passed its halfway mark. The partners have met five times (twice in person and three times online) and a huge amount of work has been done between meetings. The partners met for the sixth time on June 4th (online) to review progress and plan the next steps. The meeting was delighted to approve:
- A Comprehensive Mapping of the Global Anti-Doping Workforce (which included a survey of anti-doping organisations worldwide) which explores:
- The evolution of anti-doping in sport
- The structure and characteristics of the industry
- The anti-doping workforce and its recruitment and retention
- Current training and professional development
- Trends and challenges affecting the workforce
- Functional Map of the Global Anti-Doping Industry which highlights all the key roles and responsibilities and the principal stakeholders tasked with achieving these.
Both of these publications are fundamental to the later project ouputs and have now gone forward for professional design and translation. They will be released in August 2024.
The meeting was also pleased to hear that:
- Professional standards and competency-based blended learning for Testing Manager were now complete and that a pilot seminar had been held in Ireland with the support of World Rugby.
- Progress on professional standards and competency-based blended learning for Compliance, Major Event Organisers and Government Officials/Advisers was on track.
- Content of a Train the Trainers programme (to prepare trainers to deliver the competency-based learning) had been finalised and that a pilot seminar had taken place in Warsaw with the support of POLADA, the national anti-doping agency.
- A seminar had been held at the Global Anti-Doping Education Conference in Cannes in February 2024 to brief education experts on GLDF4CleanSport and its future products.
Next Steps
The partners then turned their attention to further products, in particular:
- An online self-assessment tool for anti-doping practitioners to measure their own capabilities and identify areas for development.
- An online self-assessment tool for anti-doping organisations to evaluate their existing training against the requirements of the new professional standards.
EOSE demonstrated similar online tools which had been developed in other projects, and the partners agreed to explore these further before the next meeting in October. This will be an in-person event in Copenhagen and will provide the opportunity for the partners to work together on the design of the tools and specifications for technical designers.
Reflection
Reflecting on the meeting, Aurélien Favre, EOSE’s Executive Director said:
“WADA and EOSE are delighted with the progress which GLDF4CleanSport is making. The more we collaborate with the partners on the project’s outputs, the more convinced I am that this project will make a major contribution to the future of anti-doping and help to protect fair play which is a fundamental principal in all sports. I am very much looking forward to meeting the partners again in person and taking the project forward into its final year in 2025 when all the fantastic products will be available to practitioners and organisations and help them to raise their game even further.”
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Contacts:
Aurélien Favre – EOSE Executive Director
Ben Gittus – EOSE Director of Standards
Youmna Saikali – WADA
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Website: www.gldf4cleansport.eu
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Partnership:
