The clean athlete carries the cost of catching cheats

Whereabouts filing and out-of-competition testing work, and the burden of both falls almost entirely on people who are not doping.

A middle-distance runner in a testing pool has to tell an international database, three months in advance, where she will be for one specified hour of every single day. Change of plan, update the app. Miss three in a year and it is treated as a positive.

That system is defensible. It is also, in practice, a tax paid by the innocent, and the sport almost never says so out loud.

Out-of-competition testing is the only part of anti-doping that has ever really worked, because the substances that build an athlete are taken in the training block, cleared long before a start list is published, and found in a race-day sample roughly never. If you only test at competitions you are testing for carelessness. So the deterrent has to be the doorbell at six in the morning in December, and the doorbell only works if the tester knows which door.

The biological passport is the same trade in another form. It stopped looking for the drug and started looking for the physiological shadow: haemoglobin, reticulocytes, steroid ratios, tracked over years, flagged when an athlete's own profile moves in a way that biology does not move on its own. That is genuinely clever and it caught people no direct test would have caught. It also means an athlete's blood values are a permanent file, and an unusual but honest profile becomes something you have to explain rather than something you simply have.

Here is my complaint, and it is not with the principle. It is with the distribution. A funded athlete in a rich federation has a manager who files the whereabouts, a team doctor who documents every supplement, and a lawyer on retainer if a flag appears. An athlete from a small federation has a phone with poor signal and nobody to call. The rules are identical. The capacity to comply is not remotely identical, and missed-filing sanctions land hardest on people whose lives are less administratively tidy.

Fix the support before tightening the rule again. Fund filing assistance the way we fund testing. Treat a missed test in a country with two collection officers differently from a missed test in one with two hundred.

The alternative is a system that catches the disorganised reliably and the well-advised occasionally, then calls the difference integrity.