Anti-Doping Rule Violation (ADRV)

The World Anti-Doping Code defines a set of violations reaching well beyond a positive test. Presence of a prohibited substance or its marker in a sample is only the first; the list also covers use or attempted use, evading collection, whereabouts failures, tampering, possession, trafficking, administration and complicity. Presence is governed by strict liability: it is the athlete's duty that no prohibited substance enters their body, and neither intent nor negligence need be shown to establish the violation.

A laboratory reports either an adverse analytical finding, which is a positive, or an atypical finding, which needs further investigation before it can be called either way. Peptide hormones, growth factors, related substances and mimetics form their own class on the Prohibited List and are banned at all times, in and out of competition. Sanction length turns on the substance class and on whether the violation was intentional.

Strict liability moves where the argument happens. Intent is irrelevant to whether a violation occurred but decisive for the sanction, and the burden of showing an innocent route sits with the athlete. Provisions for contaminated products and for no significant fault require the athlete to establish how the substance actually entered their body. A supplier's certificate is not that proof, because it is a document about a batch rather than about the sample.

The costliest error is reading the Prohibited List as a closed inventory of named compounds. Its classes end with language extending to substances of similar chemical structure or similar biological effect, and a separate class captures any pharmacological agent with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority for human therapeutic use. A research-labelled peptide appearing nowhere by name is therefore usually prohibited twice over.