Anti-Doping expert calls for “smarter” protocol after recent study suggests limited para-sport testing

A recent study from UK Anti-Doping has discovered that the number of anti-doping tests performed on para-athletes has dipped following the 2024 Paralympics.

The study found that the number of tests conducted on para-athletes dropped from 267 in 2024 to 222 in 2025.

This compares to 8,414 tests completed across all sports in 2025, almost 38 times more than in para-sport.

However, the number of positive tests coming back has been steadily increasing over the last three years, with three Adverse Analytical Findings returning in 2025, one more than the prior year.

This equates to around 1.3% of tests coming back with anti-doping violations, compared to just 0.7% in 2024 and 0.5% in 2023.

UK Anti-Doping, via their official website, describe the testing process as: “Athletes can be tested any time, any place.

“We test to deter those vulnerable to a doping decision and to find those who chose to cheat by using banned substances.

“Testing can take place in-competition at events, or out-of-competition at any other time or place, e.g., in training venues, or even at an athlete’s home.

“Testing is intelligence-led and risk-based, and it will always be conducted with ‘no advance notice.”

These results follow recent studies showing that many elite para-athletes have never been subject to anti-doping testing or education in their careers.

BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine in Sweden sent an online questionnaire to 109 elite para-athletes from 25 different countries to test their experiences with anti-doping protocol.

The study, published in December 2025, found that over 50% of these athletes had never undergone doping testing in their careers, while 27% had never received education on the subject.

25% of those who confirmed they had been tested in their career said they had difficulties completing a urine sample test, requiring a doping officer for assistance.

Another report by them for Frontiers in April 2024 questioned 66 Swedish para-athletes on anti-doping policy in general.

Of the 66 people surveyed, four athletes stated that they believe that doping should be allowed in sport, with another five stating that it should be allowed under supervision from physicians.

When asked about the issue of education on anti-doping policy, 15.8% of athletes who answered stated that they did not have “sufficient knowledge of the anti-doping rules to avoid unintentional doping”.

What is more concerning is that 58% of those who answered stated that it is difficult to keep up to date with the banned substance list, with 20 of the 29 people who said this having been educated on anti-doping protocol.

Kingston University lecturer and Anti-Doping expert Andrea Petroczi, who has worked as part of the World Anti-Doping Agency in the past, has exclusively told Spark Sunderland that she believes wider testing capacity will not help eliminate the issue.

Instead, she believes that testing needs to become smarter to catch out deliberate cheaters, whilst also not punishing those who mistakenly take illegal substances.

Petroczi said: “Widening testing in para‑sport shouldn’t be about doing more for the sake of appearances. Unless we’re clear about what additional testing is meant to achieve, escalating volume is wasteful.

“As a deterrent, more testing might work, but it’s an expensive strategy. If the goal is catching rule‑breakers, then smarter, intelligence‑led testing will always outperform sheer quantity.

“Anti-doping and testing needs to become smarter and more evidence-based. We should be able to assess how effective our anti‑doping measures actually are, then think about doing more of the same or doing it differently.

“We should look at the probability of catching deliberate dopers, the rate of inadvertent rule violations, and the likelihood that a positive test is contamination.

“Dolphins used to get caught in tuna nets until the industry set standards to prevent high dolphin mortality rates. Anti‑doping should evolve in the same way: minimise collateral damage, stop ruining athletes’ careers over contamination or a cold medicine taken abroad without checking properly, and focus resources on catching those who are genuinely cheating.

“In para‑sport, intentional misrepresentation in classification poses a greater competitive threat than doping. If someone is seeking an unfair advantage, misclassification delivers a far higher return than banned substances.”

Classification misrepresentation has proven to be a major issue in para-sport, with scandals involving misclassification going as high as Paralympic level.

The biggest of these happened in 2000, when the Spanish intellectual disability basketball team were stripped of their gold medal at the 2000 Summer Paralympics in Sydney, after it was revealed in Spanish publication Capital that most of the team wasn’t tested for having a disability.

The report also claimed that some Spanish participants in table tennis, track and field and swimming were also not disabled, and that five medals had been fraudulently won.

Most recently, discus thrower Vinod Kumar was banned for two years at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics after being found to have “intentionally misrepresented his abilities.”