Wednesday 17 April 2019, 12:37

Concacaf doping control officers ready for the Gold Cup

Member associations and confederations are key collaborators in the global fight against doping and FIFA has a network of trained doping control officers (DCOs) around the world, who are all medical doctors. One of the main pillars of FIFA’s anti-doping strategy is prevention through education and FIFA recently helped the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf) run a doping control workshop for DCOs on 8 and 9 April.

The course was led by FIFA representatives with the aim of updating the knowledge and expertise of DCOs and making sure that they were up to date with the latest regulations and strategies to fight doping as well as ensuring uniformity across all confederations.

Agenda topics included current trends in the doping control programme, sample collections, draw procedures, doping control forms, banned substances, use of supplements and therapeutic use exemptions. The workshop was a mix of theoretical and practical learning with an examination at the end of the intensive two-day training course.

The workshop came right ahead of the Concacaf DCOs’ next mission, the biennial Gold Cup, which will be held in June and July this year in the United States of America, Costa Rica and Jamaica.

Of the course and upcoming controls, Bert Mandelbaum, chairman of the Concacaf Medicine Committee, said: “The comprehensive educational and training mission led by FIFA was an outstanding event for our confederation. This level of collaboration and partnership is essential to the stepwise preparations for the Gold Cup in 2019 and, in the long term, to the World Cup 2026.”