Members of England’s World Cup squad will be among the world’s first elite athletes to undergo new doping test regimes that scientists hope will cut out the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.
Players at this summer’s World Cup in Brazil are to have their blood and urine compared to samples taken in previous competitions to check whether there are any discrepancies.
Their samples will also be stored for a number of years so scientists can re-analyse them in the future.
Doping experts said storing samples would mean that performance-enhancing drugs which were undetectable using current testing methods may be picked up later.
It would also mean that any changes in their biological make-up could be tracked over time.
They said this would be a “major deterrent” for athletes who considered the use of such drugs.
The news comes after a meeting of major sports federations, leading medics and doping experts which concluded that athletes should have “biological passports”.
This would mean that tiny changes to an athlete’s unique genetic blueprint made by doping techniques could be identified without the need to identify the substance itself.
Reporting the conclusion of the meeting in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, experts set out a series of recommendations on how to crack down on increasingly sophisticated doping techniques, including storing samples for prolonged periods and the adoption of athlete biological passports.
In an accompanying podcast, FIFA’s chief medical officer Professor Jiri Dvorak said: “The fight against doping has intensified over the last 10 to 15 years.
“The increase of simple sampling procedures both in and out of competition controls does not stop some athletes to continue with doping strategies.
“It has been mentioned that the athletes, or their supporting personnel, are a step ahead of the science.
“So we discussed whether this is true and whether the current strategy is the right one.
“This strategy was developed in the late 1960s. Meanwhile, the world of sport has changed.
“There is a strong evidence that, if you re-analyse the samples from past years, that new methods would find them. This is an extremely deterrent method.
“Most of the international federations decided to freeze the samples for a number of years.
“FIFA will do that from the 2014 World Cup - we will freeze them and keep them as long as we want and we can always revisit the samples.”
He said the method would act as a doping deterrent because athletes could never predict whether or not currently undetectable substances could be found in the future.
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