For the last four years, I have been searching for good, young, fresh, and unknown musicians to promote. I wanted artists who could sing well in both English and Luganda, while also delivering strong stage performances in front of an audience.
Ideally, I was looking for a dancing singer as the best artist to promote. My search was futile, and three weeks ago, I decided to start making my own music. Through that experience, I understood first-hand why it can be tempting to engage in doping, because the energy demands of singing and dancing at the same time are enormous.
Athletes can easily be lured into doping to gain more energy and endurance in order to win competitions. In simple terms, doping means using prohibited or banned performance enhancers such as cocaine, marijuana (cannabis), heroin, and others.
When athletes have not prepared well for a competition but still want to win, they may resort to doping. This gives them an unfair advantage over those who have prepared genuinely through intense training.
For this reason, it is important for competition organisers to ensure that doping athletes are identified and stopped from unfairly winning competitions with the help of prohibited substances. These substances give athletes energy and endurance that they should not have.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) regularly releases a list of prohibited performance enhancers. Athletes, coaches, and sports federation leaders are expected to take note of these substances and ensure they are not consumed. WADA also has offices around the world that conduct random tests on athletes to detect the presence of these substances in their bodies.
Once an athlete tests positive for any listed substance, they can be suspended from competition for periods ranging from months to years. It is therefore very important for athletes, coaches, and federation leaders to know which medications, foods, or drinks must be avoided. The first challenge, however, is that the chemical names of the prohibited substances listed in WADA documents are very complex, even for someone like me who is a trained chemistry teacher.
Examples include nandrolone, stanozolol, erythropoietin, methamphetamine, and methylhexaneamine. These are not simple names that can easily be understood by athletes, coaches, and federation leaders, many of whom do not have a background in advanced chemistry.
The second challenge is identifying which foods, drinks, or medications contain these prohibited substances. Very few people check the list of ingredients before consuming anything. The third issue is that with hundreds of substances listed under complicated chemical names, even if an athlete or coach checks the ingredients, it is difficult to remember which ones appear on the WADA list.
I therefore advised the new National Anti-Doping Organisation (NADO) board of Uganda, headed by Professor Celestino Obua, to collect commonly used medications, foods, and drinks consumed by Ugandan athletes and have them tested for the presence of banned substances. Athletes should then be warned against consuming any items found to contain prohibited substances.
NADO Uganda should also develop a localized list of banned substances using the common names of medications, foods, and drinks that athletes and coaches can easily understand. In addition, it should regularly test commonly consumed products in Uganda and keep updating this “Local List of Banned Substances.”
Only by simplifying this process can we truly help our athletes avoid unintentional WADA violations that could damage or even end their sporting careers.
The writer is a bush lawyer, former President of the Uganda Table Tennis Association (UTTA), Secretary General of the Union of Uganda Sports Federations and Associations (UUSFA), and a board member of the Uganda Olympic Committee (UOC).
