By Bockarie Allieu
FREETOWN, July 14 (SALONE TIMES) – Last week the National Olympic Committee (NOC) in collaboration with the Ministry of Sports and the National Sports Authority (NSA) organized a training course for Doping Control Officers (DCO). The training took place at the Sierra Palm Beach Resort Aberdeen Freetown.
In all five participants four male one female took part in the training. Two experts from Kenya conducted the training and at the end awarded certificates to the participants. According to the Chairman of the Local Doping Commission Dr. Patrick Coker who also doubles as the Chairman of the Anti-Doping Commission in Africa said the above training would have taking place two years back. But said they skipped it due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 in the world. Doping he said is a big problem in sports, a reason he said the World Anti-Doping Associations (WADA) is trying to let all countries in the world involve in the prevention of the taking of enhancing drugs in the world. To enable them to prevent it, he said they need trained people who can do the test to know who have been involve in taking drugs for extra energy by collecting the samples and send it to the labs for test. He went on that it is for such training that they organized the above training in Sierra Leone. Before them he said athletes from Sierra Leone will be only tested when they arrive in the Games because there were no trained people to do the test. It was because of this he said they apply to WADA and the Regional Anti- Doping Organization (RADO) who sent two people from the WADA technical team to come and do the training. Dr. Coker though said the new DCO’s will not do the test for the Commonwealth Games and the Islamic Games but assure they will be effective to do test for future Games. Beside he said Doping test for one athlete is very expensive and it cost $500 for one test. For the moment he said it five DCOs but in the future they will train more especially when they will have more athletes. The training he said one thing but the availability of funds is very paramount to enable the Doping Control Officers to work effectively. Dr. Coker went on that WADA will be in Sierra Leone next year to audit them and that one thing they will be looking for is whether they have trained DCOs and have they being doing tests and whether Sierra Leone has been paying their contributions. After the training Dr. Coker told the various sports that sooner or later they will start to do tests on athletes at any giving time.
