Strict liability makes the athlete the quality control department

Anti-doping rules hold competitors responsible for whatever is in a supplement tub, including things the label never mentions.

You are responsible for what is in your body. Not for what you intended, not for what the label said, not for what the manufacturer certified. That is the doctrine, and I understand exactly why it exists, which is that any rule requiring proof of intent would be unenforceable within a week.

The consequence is that a rule designed to catch deliberate cheating routinely lands on people who bought a tub of protein from a shop. Cross-contamination in supplement manufacturing is well documented; a facility that produces a prohibited compound on Monday and a flavoured powder on Tuesday will occasionally send out trace amounts of the first inside the second. The athlete has no way to detect this. Neither, in most cases, does the retailer.

Governing bodies answered with batch testing programmes and certification schemes, which help, and which quietly shift the burden again. Certification costs money. So the professional with a nutritionist and a budget buys the tested product and the semi-professional buys what is on the shelf, and strict liability, in practice, is enforced more harshly against poorer athletes. That is not a hypothetical. Look at who ends up in front of national panels arguing about a contaminated fat burner.

There is a further twist that the rules handle badly. Sanction lengths were reduced for cases of no significant fault, which sounds humane and creates an incentive to construct a contamination story. Panels now spend enormous effort adjudicating narratives about what somebody bought in an airport, because the difference between four years and four months turns on it. We have built a legal industry around the origin story of a supplement tub.

My view is that the doctrine should stay and the remedy should change. Keep strict liability for eligibility, because you cannot police intent, but separate eligibility from culpability entirely. Suspend the result. Do not brand the person. And make the certification schemes free at the point of use for anyone in a testing pool, funded by the federations, because a rule that punishes you for a manufacturing failure you could not detect is only defensible if detection is provided.