Discussion: Testing

There you go then. I didn't realise each country had a say in drug-testing (and therefore, to a certain extent, self-policing) their own athletes. I thought it was all under WADA's remit. Segregation of duties, no?

It even goes down to sports body level. I recall complaints in France many years back about how much of the orienteering budget was being spent on testing athletes (meanwhile the Americans and Russians (non-orienteers) were testing drugs). Though maybe they were obliged to spend the money by the government.

The theory behind that is so spectacularly flawed. And gets athletics to where it is today.

Don't know how it works in other countries, but in Australia the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority decides who it wants to test (and when), and pays for it; if sports decide they want additional testing on top of that they pick up the cost. Low-risk sports tend not to get tested very often; about once a decade for me and I gather that's fairly typical unless you're at the very top. I know from acquaintances in that scene that athletics in Australia gets tested fairly heavily.

I suspect the French were almost certainly operating under a government mandate of some kind.

In some instances it´s the organizer that is required to pay for testing.
In the case of WUOC that my club organized a couple of years ago a substantial part of our budget went that way...