World Cup players face stringent doping test

Footballers Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Gary Cahill will be among the world’s first elite athletes to undergo new doping test regimes that scientists hope will cut out the use of performance enhancing drugs in sport.

Players at 2014 Fifa World Cup in Brazil are to have their blood and urine compared to samples taken in previous competitions to check whether there are any discrepancies.

Their samples will also be stored for a number of years so scientists can re-analyse them in the future.

Doping experts said storing samples would mean that performance enhancing drugs which were undetectable using current testing methods may be picked up later. They said this would be a “major deterrent” for athletes who considered the use of such drugs.

The news comes after a meeting of major sports federations, leading medics and doping experts which concluded that athletes should have “biological passports”.

This would mean that tiny changes to an athlete’s unique genetic blueprint made by doping techniques could be identified without the need to identify the substance itself.

Reporting the conclusion of the meeting in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, experts set out a series of recommendations on how to crack down on increasingly sophisticated doping techniques, including storing samples for prolonged periods and the adoption of athlete biological passports.

Fifa’s chief medical officer, Professor Jiri Dvorak, said: “It has been mentioned that the athletes, or their supporting personnel, are a step ahead of the science. So we discussed whether this is true and whether the current strategy is the right one. This strategy was developed in the late 1960s, meanwhile the world of sport has changed.”

Participants in the World Cup in Brazil in June will have their blood and urine tested at least once before the competition, as well as during it, and Fifa doping experts will compare these to previous sampling.