S2 E2 | Fighting a win-at-all-costs mentality, with USADA’s Tammy Hanson and ASADA’s Alexis Cooper
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English - February 13, 2020 06:00 - 21 minutes - 50 MBRugby Sports Education anti antidoping asada australia australian authority cheat cheating dope doping Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
This episode focuses on an anti-doping education collaboration between the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA), the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and Drug Free Sport New Zealand (DFSNZ).
USADA’s Elite Education Manager Tammy Hanson says while there are a lot of similarities between the programs, collaborating and sharing resources was “invaluable”.
“We’re questioning everything that we do, pushing forward, making changes if they’re for the better and making sure we’re leaning on our resources - to collaborate, not to work in silos, but to share resources…” she says. “It enables the agencies to bounce ideas and discuss the best approaches and messaging for athletes.”
ASADA’s A/G Director of Education and Innovation Alexis Cooper says the challenge is capturing the attention of athletes, parents, coaches, and the sporting community through new technologies.
“Anti-doping is often not the most exciting thing that athletes want to talk about,” Cooper says. “They would often rather be training so what we do is use new technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, apps, those sorts of things to try to cut through and engage the audiences and get them interested.”
They both agreed that education is about building positive cultures, ensuring athletes understand how choosing to take performance enhancing drugs impacts them, their reputation and their country’s reputation.
“We’re not fighting a war on drugs, we are fighting a win-at-all-costs mentality,” Hanson says, “so anything that we can do to help them (athletes) really start thinking about the decisions that they make, that using a dietary supplement is a thought, it’s a decision; trusting a coach when they give you advice, that’s a decision that you’re making; not reporting doping or reporting it, that’s a decision…”
ASADA's Assistant Director of Operations also joins this episode providing an answer to the question "Are doping protocols the same everywhere?".