ARD Investigation Estimates at Least 10 Million Children in Sport Have Been Doped

At least 10 million children who compete in sport have been doped, according to an estimate published Sunday by the doping unit at German broadcaster ARD. The number rests on 44 anonymous surveys of young athletes from 15 countries, which together put the rate of doping at 5 to 6 percent on average. ARD and the experts it worked with applied that rate to around 200 million children between eight and 17 who compete in organized sport, the low end of the United Nations’ range.

The surveys were not uniform in size or method. ARD kept the ones focused on steroids, growth hormone and similar substances, and dropped others, including a German study whose count took in cannabis. Paulo David, a former secretary of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, told ARD he expects the true figure is higher, since some children will have been too scared to tell the truth and others are handed drugs without knowing what they are. “There is a big, massive problem, and nothing is being done about it,” he said.

When the World Anti-Doping Agency released Operation Refuge, its own study of doping among minors, in January 2024, athletics and aquatics were the two sports reported most often to its confidential hotline, the Associated Press reported. EPO was the substance found most often in track and field cases. Among the examples WADA gave were three Chinese track and field athletes who tested positive for stanozolol in 2021, and the youngest athlete sanctioned anywhere in the study was just 12.

That same WADA data, as ARD lays it out, shows 1,416 minors returning a positive test from 2012 through September 2023. Averaged out, about 118 children a year are caught, or roughly one a year for every 85,000 the surveys suggest are doping.

Anti-doping rules written to the World Anti-Doping Code make naming a sanctioned athlete mandatory, but that requirement falls away when the athlete is a minor, a recreational athlete or a “Protected Person.” That last category includes anyone under 16, along with 16- and 17-year-olds who are outside a registered testing pool and have never raced internationally in an open category. Any disclosure in those cases has to be proportionate, so a child who is caught need never be named.

Some governments and anti-doping bodies have turned their attention to the adults who supply the drugs. India plans to make supplying doping drugs a crime, and Ethiopia’s anti-doping chief said this month that pharmacists, doctors and sports staff are under investigation on suspicion of helping athletes dope. ARD says it found parents, coaches, doctors and officials doping minors, and that in the cases it documented, the adults often walked away while the child took the ban.

The findings come from Doping Top Secret: Children, a six-part ARD series due out Friday, Nov. 13, with German and English versions. The team spent six years reporting it, working in over 50 countries across 25 sports.