Positive doping tests are ‘not a victory', says US Anti-Doping Agency head Travis Tygart

American cyclist Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping. Photo: Robert Laberge/Getty Images

27 Oct 2024

The man considered to be at the forefront of sports anti-doping policing sees positive tests as a failure of the system.

If you’ve followed professional sport for any length of time, you might have heard the name Travis Tygart. If you’re a doper in professional sport, you hope you never hear that name.

Tygart is a lean 53-year-old lawyer from Florida who heads up the US Anti-Doping Agency (Usada), the most powerful and well-resourced of its kind.

Only the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has more clout in the battle against performance-enhancing drugs in sport, and even that is debatable.

In person, Tygart is warm, sharp as a Savile Row suit and deeply passionate about the cause of keeping professional sports clean. The natural assumption is that his passion stems from wanting to catch dopers and make them pay for their crimes. But Tygart’s quest is far more empathetic.

“We’re here to protect clean athletes and make sure that they can not only compete clean, but they can win clean,” Tygart told Daily Maverick when we met at the offices of the South African Institute for Drug Free Sports in Cape Town.

“If they can’t win clean, then we’re not giving them what we owe them. And so I think we have to wake up every day and come into the office every morning and fight really hard.

“We don’t set out to destroy people’s lives. It’s supposed to be a deterrent, mainly, and if you’re not deterred, you get detected, then it should be a severe punishment.

“We are sometimes like a cop, but if we’re seen as the cop, we’re the community policing. We need the community to embrace what we’re doing because at the end of the day, it’s their [athletes’] community. If they don’t want to get robbed, then we need their help to be part of this.”

Tygart is famous for being the man who brought down cyclist Lance Armstrong after he had doped his way to seven Tour de France titles between 1999 and 2005.

Read more: Trust, transparency? The not-so-strict liability of Wada’s handling of the Chinese swimming doping controversy

Not that Tygart takes great satisfaction from that episode – or any positive doping test, for that matter.

“We don’t like positive tests on a Lance Armstrong, or him cheating, any more than anybody else does,” Tygart said. “That’s not a victory for us. That’s not a good day.

“That means we couldn’t prevent him from doping and our prevention efforts failed. But the reality is, most athletes are expecting, if you’re cheating, that you can’t get away with it. If they do get away with it, many athletes will go and cheat, and the whole thing will become corrupt.

“So, while [catching offenders is] not anything necessarily to celebrate, you can be satisfied that you’re doing the job you’re supposed to do.”

doping Armstrong American cyclist Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping. (Photo: Robert Laberge / Getty Images)

Speaking up

But in the world of sports doping, not everything is simple, because politics and power play a role.

Usada is currently at loggerheads with Wada over 23 Chinese swimmers who failed doping tests before the Tokyo 2020 Olympics (held in 2021), which came to light in 2024, just before the Paris Games.

It appears the policy of strict liability, for athletes to prove innocence from a position of presumed guilt, was not applied.

Wada accepted the version from the Chinese Anti-Doping Agency, that trimetazidine was found in the swimmers’ systems because they had been victims of “contamination”, without conducting an on-the-ground investigation.

Usada was incensed because the anti-doping code places a heavy burden on athletes to prove their innocence and there are very few cases where positive dope tests are overturned.

Even before a tribunal, athletes who have tested positive in any way are suspended, pending the hearing. They cannot compete until cleared or, as is most often the case, they are suspended and serve their time.

Tygart is unapologetic that the story appears to be about him versus China and Wada. He is sceptical about the rigour of the Chinese anti-doping system.

“It ought to be a war,” he said. “It is one, from our position. Wada, of course, wanted to make it personal and divert attention away from the fact that China didn’t enforce the rules.

“They turned a blind eye to the enforcement of those rules. What was really frustrating to us, right after it got exposed through a media leak, was that they said they would do it all over again, in the same exact way.

“That was a blow for those of us in the trenches who enforce these rules on a daily basis. Our athletes are saying, ‘Well, wait a minute, we know this isn’t right…’

“It has everything to do with the fact that we need answers, because our athletes are asking us for answers. Our taxpayers who pay Wada are asking for answers.”

Burden

Athletes who test positive carry the heaviest burden of punishment, whereas the corrupt physicians, coaches and managers who enable an athlete to dope generally escape completely.

Tygart has a great deal of empathy for athletes because he would prefer that anti-doping agencies are preventative bodies rather than punishers. “Athletes usually make their own choices,” he said. “I would say maybe over in Russia, in state-sponsored doping, and in China, with those positives on those 23 athletes, it’s different.

“Those athletes didn’t even know they had a positive test. I mean, this is the old East Germans. ‘Here are your vitamins, here are your supplements.’

“In the US, an athlete is not going to be forced to use one of these drugs. They make their choices.

“However, they are frequently in a victim situation in which a coach is telling them, if you don’t get bigger, we’re gonna cut you from the team. In the US Postal cycling scandal [Armstrong’s team], we saw that if they [teammates] didn’t do these drugs, they weren’t going to sign a contract.

“And so, the real bad people in this system are those coaches and those systems, the people within those systems [who] prey on those athletes.

“So, our strategy has always been, yes, the athletes need to be held accountable, particularly where they have a free choice. But we frequently see systems that don’t give them a free choice.

“And we are better off taking care of those in the system because we can just punish athletes for years to come.

“If we don’t change the system, it’s just throwing away good money after bad because we’re just continuing to create athletes [who] dope and try to get away with it until they get caught.

“The anti-doping strategy, I believe, has to take that into consideration.

“Athletes have to suffer the consequences they have to suffer.

“But where you can even go [and] give them a benefit, leniency in their sentence, is to get at the coaches, the team doctors, the team owners, those people [who] aren’t in any testing programme.

“The only way you’re going to discipline [the enablers] and kick them out of sport is through evidence [provided by athletes testifying against them].

“So you have to be willing to do that. And it’s a little bit of a trade-off.” DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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