De Nederlandse topsporter en het anti-dopingbeleid 2014-2015 / Erik Duiven en Olivier de Hon. - Capelle aan de IJssel, 2015
Athletes must comply with the doping regulations adopted by the sports organisations. There is also some resistance among some athletes to the implementation of the anti-doping policy. The Anti-Doping Authority Netherlands (ADAN) periodically surveys Dutch elite athletes to determine their views of this policy.
The goals of this study were:
1. to establish a picture of the efficacy, and the perception, of the current anti-doping policy and procedures within the total field of Dutch elite sports;
2. to evaluate the anti-doping policy of ADAN;
3. to establish concrete recommendations with the aim of making doping detection methods more effective and developing educational resources that will prevent unnecessary pressure on the athletes.
In line with previous years, the ‘elite-status athletes’ were the main target group. These are athletes who have been granted the official elite status by the Netherlands Olympic Committee*Netherlands Sports Confederation (NOC*NSF) and as such they have shown to be able to place in the top-8 in world championships in their respective disciplines, or can be expected to reach this level in the near future.
For the first time, the group surveyed also included elite Track & Field (T&F) athletes, elite cyclists and a group of other elite athletes, all competing at the highest national level in their respective disciplines.
The doping prevalence questions were established using the ‘Randomised Response’ method. This method uses randomisation to produce more honest answers to questions that are socially sensitive. This was the first time this method had been used in a study of doping in elite sports in the Netherlands.
Dutch elite sport is not doping-free. The best available estimate is that 4.2% of elite-status athletes use doping. The estimate of the number of doping users in Dutch elite sports is higher than the estimates from previous studies of Dutch elite athletes. This is most probably due to the use of the ‘Randomised Response’ method.
