Fitness Against Doping

In November 2010 EHFA was awarded European Union funding for a project called Fitness Against Doping, announced in a press release of 18 November 2010. The project worked with gym operators on anti-doping education for the people who train in their facilities.

Anti-doping in Europe is organised around competitive sport. Athletes are tested, their federations enforce the rules, and sanctions follow from them. None of that machinery reaches the person who trains in a gym to change how they look, or who takes a substance to train harder or recover faster. They compete in nothing, they belong to no federation, and no testing regime applies to them. The place where they train is a fitness facility, and the people who see them there are the sector's own staff.

That is the gap the project was funded to work in. Anti-doping policy had been designed around competition, and the population that uses a gym for reasons of its own sits outside that design. A message built for athletes does not reach them, and a sanction that can only be applied to a registered competitor cannot be applied to them at all. If anything was going to reach them, it would have to come from the people who operate the facilities they use.

The project's approach was educational. It worked with gym operators on anti-doping education for the people who train in their facilities - the operators being the ones who decide what a facility tells its members and what its staff are equipped to talk about. That is a different proposition from doping control: it asks an operator to treat the subject as part of looking after the people who train there, rather than as a matter for somebody else's rules.

That is a harder position to hold than it sounds. No rule obliges a gym to have a view on doping, the subject is easy to leave alone, and raising it with members can be taken as an accusation aimed at them rather than as information offered to them. Which is why the operators, and not a regulator or a testing agency, were the starting point for the work: nothing reaches the person training in a gym unless the operator of that gym decides to be part of it.

EHFA reported the project as it went. An interim report was circulated to the sector with a request for feedback, and preliminary results from the project were published in November 2011, in a news item of 9 November 2011 issued with a statement by the association. What those results showed belongs with the association's own statement of them; the account here is of the project's scope and of the problem it was funded to address, not of its findings.

The surviving record of the project in the news archive covers the award, the interim report and those preliminary results. It sits alongside the association's other EU-funded work, which is collected under EU projects and includes the Becoming the Hub study and the EA-Fitness project.