There’s a contradiction at the heart of elite distance running right now. Performances keep getting faster, anti-doping numbers keep going up, and yet fans remain deeply hesitant to take anything at face value.
That tension sits squarely at the center of a newly released Athletics Integrity Unit testing overview. The report serves as a year-in-review of sorts, laying out how often athletes were tested, who carried out those tests, and how much scrutiny the sport’s top performers faced in the months leading into the season’s biggest event.
On paper, it’s the strongest testing picture athletics has ever presented. Whether that’s enough to move the needle on trust is another question entirely.
What the AIU is actually reporting
The headline figure is blatantly clear. In the ten months before Tokyo, athletes who ultimately competed at the World Championships underwent a shared total of 6,193 out-of-competition tests, a 49 percent increase compared to the equivalent period before London 2017.
That alone marks a shift in how aggressively athletics is now testing outside competition. But the more revealing detail is actually where that growth came from.
Over the past eight years, national anti-doping organisations have taken on a much larger share of the work. NADO-led out-of-competition testing of championship athletes jumped from 2,296 tests ahead of London to 3,940 ahead of Tokyo, a 71 percent increase. Between Budapest 2023 and Tokyo 2025 alone, NADO testing rose by 19 percent.
AIU testing, meanwhile, remained relatively steady. But that seems to be by design.
World Athletics’ anti-doping rules place explicit obligations on national federations to test their athletes domestically, particularly those from countries deemed higher risk. The AIU enforces those standards, but it no longer tries to be everywhere at once.
As AIU chair David Howman put it, stronger domestic programmes allow the unit to focus on intelligence-led testing at the very top of the sport, looking at the athletes most likely to reach finals and stand on podiums.
It’s a cleaner division of labour, and one that the AIU has been pushing for years.
A New Era Of Testing?
For all the talk about totals, the most important statistic in the report is this: Tokyo is the first World Championships where over half of the athletes arrived having undergone at least three out-of-competition tests during the official pre-event window.
Just over half the field, 52.9 percent, fell into that category. Only 20.6 percent arrived with no out-of-competition testing at all, the lowest figure in the AIU’s reporting history.
Now, that’s not nothing.
Ahead of Eugene 2022, a full third of athletes arrived untested. Budapest improved on that, but still saw more than a quarter of the field with zero out-of-competition controls. Tokyo is. pushing that downward trend forward.
Among finalists, testing was even tougher. Top-eight finishers averaged nearly six out-of-competition tests before the championships, with many accumulating nine to twelve total tests once in-competition testing was included. Only a tiny fraction of finalists arrived without prior out-of-competition testing.
This is what progress in anti-doping usually looks like. It’s not usually dramatic announcements, but fewer gaps and fewer places to hide.
Why fans still aren’t convinced
And yet, despite all of this, skepticism remains baked into the sport’s culture.
That’s not because fans haven’t read the numbers. It’s because we’ve seen them before. Athletics has a long history of promising change, only for major cases to surface years later, long after medals were handed out and narratives cemented.
The past year hasn’t helped. Exceptional performances, particularly in women’s distance events, have reignited familiar debates about plausibility and oversight. Social media has made those conversations louder than ever, stripping away nuance in favour of instant judgment.
Cases like Ruth Chepngetich’s suspension earlier this year didn’t just dominate headlines. It reinforced a broader sense that the sport is still really vulnerable, even as testing expands and improves. Every major case essentially resets the clock, reminding fans that detection often trails performance.
What actually feels different this time
There is, however, a genuine shift buried in the Tokyo data.
The AIU now operates a more clearly defined two-tier system. It maintains direct responsibility for athletes in its Registered Testing Pool, particularly those ranked in the global top ten.
At the same time, NADOs are increasingly expected to focus on athletes just below that level, the ones rising quickly, breaking through nationally, or emerging from deep talent pools.
Historically, that’s been a weak point. Athletes could move from obscurity to global relevance faster than testing systems could react. By the time scrutiny arrived, performances were already on the books.
The Tokyo figures suggest that the gap is not eliminated completely, but it is narrowing.
The AIU has also leaned harder into transparency.
It now publishes pre-championship testing data for all national teams with ten or more athletes and retains the authority to issue corrective action notices to federations deemed to be falling short. In extreme cases, it can impose minimum testing requirements for future championships.
That kind of openness invites criticism. It also signals a willingness to be judged on outcomes, not assurances.
The question that Just Won’t go away
For all the improvements outlined in the report, one uncomfortable question remains: Is more testing enough?
History suggests it isn’t, at least on its own. Doping has always evolved alongside detection, adapting as rules tighten. What testing can do, when applied consistently and intelligently, is raise the cost of cheating and shrink the margins for error.
The Tokyo data suggests athletics is finally doing more of that work before athletes reach the world stage, rather than reacting after the fact. That matters, especially for clean athletes who have long argued that prevention is just as important as punishment.
Whether it’s enough to rebuild trust is another matter. Trust doesn’t return on a testing cycle.
Still, for a sport often accused of hiding behind vague promises, the AIU’s decision to put hard numbers in the open matters. It gives fans something concrete to assess, and federations something harder to ignore.
