FIFA to examine anti-doping passport with WADA

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NEUCHATEL, Switzerland, Oct 28, 2009 (AFP) - FIFA president Sepp Blatter said that football's governing body would discuss its plans to introduce biological passports for players with anti-doping chiefs on Thursday.

"The biological passport is what we want to do and we want to take a step ahead in the fight against doping," Blatter said on Wednesday at a debate on sports and doping.

"We are working on that. Tomorrow we will have meetings with the people from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)," he added. The meeting is due to take place at FIFA headquarters in Zurich.

A biological passport is designed to keep permanent record of an athlete's blood and urine parameters to detect any suspicious changes, instead of relying on random tests alone.

However, the exact format of FIFA's proposed passport and testing regime was unclear.

FIFA and WADA have frequently been at loggerheads over anti-doping measures.

Blatter has rejected making footballers available for random out-of-competition drugs testing 365 days a year, a measure introduced this year for athletes in all sports under the world anti-doping code.

Instead, he has insisted that footballers could only be available for tests while they were with their teams.

The footballing and anti-doping bodies have also been at odds over the full duration of a suspension for doping offences.

Blatter suggested during the debate in the Swiss city of Neuchatel that the biological passport could "eventually give greater freedom" to individual athletes and tackle the issue of availability.

But the president of world football's governing body also called into question the reliability of the network of WADA supervised anti-doping laboratories.

"I am attacking, a bit, the laboratories," he said.

"We can ask the question of whether the tests in all the labs are reliable."

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge, who also took part in the debate, insisted that the laboratories approved for anti-doping tests were subjected to "draconian standards."

Rogge said about two percent of anti doping tests carried out in sport were positive, while a similar percentage of drug takers were thought to slip through the net.

However, Blatter, who also hinted at qualms about the amount of tests athletes should submit to, came up with much lower rates for football.

FIFA's chief claimed that 0.3 percent of dope tests in the game were positive, including just 0.03 percent for performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids or amphetamines, while the rest revealed recreational drugs.

The biological passport was introduced in cycling in 2008.