Soccer players will not receive special consideration for drug-testing under the controversial whereabouts rule, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Sunday. WADA chief John Fahey dismissed allegations that the anti-doping agency had appeased soccer's world governing body FIFA by watering down its whereabouts rule, which requires athletes to give three months' notice of where they will be for an hour each day. FIFA and European soccer body UEFA have pressed for changes, arguing the rule is harsh and unfair and should apply only to teams and not individual players. “The (WADA) Code was accepted, and I might add unanimously, with those whereabouts requirements, and nothing has changed as far as we are concerned,” WADA president Fahey told reporters following executive board meetings. “We haven't made any concessions.” FIFA has previously demanded that out-of-competition tests take place only at club training facilities, and that players should not be tested during holidays to respect their private lives. But WADA said FIFA's chief medical representative had personally endorsed the code at the meeting on Sunday. “FIFA was represented today at the meeting by their representative (chief medical officer) Jiri Dvorak ... and he put to rest the indication that there has been some sort of arrangement,” said WADA director general David Howman. “There is none and he conceded there was none by making that very clear statement,” Howman said. The debate over athletes' privacy versus efforts to guarantee clean, fair sport has raged in recent weeks, with a European Union panel last month recommending WADA reassess the rule, which they said contravened the bloc's privacy laws. Some 65 athletes in Belgium, including cyclists and volleyball players have also lodged a legal challenge to quash the rule, arguing it breaches EU privacy laws. The issue has created considerable confusion, as both FIFA and WADA have claimed victories as to how the rule is applied. “The issue is one where things seem to be lost in translation,” Howman told Reuters. Howman said the rule would only require a small minority of soccer players to declare their whereabouts, while decisions on the number of players to be tested would ultimately rest with individual leagues and countries' national Olympic committees. “The only athletes that have to give that one hour a day designation are those that are either in their international testing pool or their national one,” Howman said. “We don't say you have to have 1,000 players or the top 1,000 in the country, we say ‘look at who you think ought to be here.'” Howman said WADA expected national bodies to be “sensible” about how they picked their players and indicated they would be subject to ongoing scrutiny. “That's what we have to look at the end of the year. To see if it's actually working.”
