UK Athletes Urged to Inform on Dopers in Run-up to Beijing

British athletes who currently "turn a blind eye" to drugs cheats should be prepared to inform on them to help drive doping out of sport, according to the head of the UK's anti-doping authority, John Scott, who was speaking as UK Sport announced a £1m program to test every British Olympic athlete before they travel to the Beijing Games later this year.

UK Sport is in the process of developing a new independent national anti-doping organization that will place a greater emphasis on intelligence gathering and investigation than the traditional testing-based approach to anti-doping.

Persuading athletes, coaches and medics to pass on information regarding those they suspect of doping is central to the new approach. Scott believes its success will rest on the willingness of athletes to reject cheats but said athletes were currently not doing enough to help. "I think we have a way to go [regarding co-operation from athletes]. I believe that athletes can do more but the information has to be relevant and verifiable and it is for us to create a system that allows us to build a case that we can prove," Scott said. "I still maintain that one of the best pressures is athletes themselves. They are in constant contact with each other and [clean] athletes have to constantly reinforce a zero-tolerance attitude by not turning a blind eye and not walking out if they see something going on but confronting it."

Anti-doping officials hope that the revised World Anti-Doping Agency code, which offers incentives for cheats to inform on their peers in the form of reduced penalties, will help persuade competitors to talk. In the build-up to Beijing UK Sport will carry out up to 1,500 tests, its largest ever pre-Olympic testing program, with the aim of taking at least one blood or urine sample from every athlete that makes the final Great Britain team.

Scott believes the program is necessary to maintain pressure on athletes tempted to use dope and to boost public confidence in the probity of athletics performance. "Our core priority is to make sure that athletes have no desire to dope, realize the consequences if they do and give some assurance to the British public that the performance of British athletes is their true performance," he said. "What we want to do is demonstrate through rigorous pre-games testing that we are doing everything that we can to prevent anyone who is cheating going to the Games. Whether it will be 100% successful we don't know but we are sending out very strong messages to discourage people."

One athlete Scott would particularly like to hear from is Dwain Chambers, who has failed to share his experience of the doping regime prescribed by the Victor Conte Balco laboratory. "We have put out feelers to Dwain but have heard nothing. Contrition is good but we need more than that, particularly of someone who has been convicted of as serious an offense as Dwain. We certainly don't know who else was in the know, whether there are people in the system he worked with who have not been removed from the system."

Last night, however, Chambers' lawyer Nick Collins said: "As far as I am aware no contact has been made with Dwain or any of his representatives."