I’ve Been a Doping Control Officer for 35 Years. Here’s What It’s Like.

June 8, 2026

Testing athletes for banned substances on race day isn’t that difficult. Ensuring that they’re clean the other 364 days of the year is another story.

The trouble is that athletes only spend a tiny fraction of their lives in the arena. The rest of the time, they’re moving about the world unscrutinized, living and training behind closed doors. That adds up to millions of hours of unobserved downtime. Which begs the question: How is enforcement even possible?

That’s the question the international anti-doping industry has had to ask itself after every headlining scandal. While some groups (see: the 2026 Enhanced Games) have advocated giving up on enforcement entirely, most of the sporting world has doggedly accepted it as a reality of modern athletics.

Today, the international anti-doping machine has settled on a solution that functions something like a collaborative international spy network: a global army of doping control officers (DCO). Outside