Under surveillance but still caught doing doping.
The 2024 National Bodybuilding Championship will take place in late October and early November in Ca Mau. This tournament will be the subject of random sampling by the Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine. Prior to this, according to the 2024 plan, the Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine had identified approximately 30 athletes for random sampling at several competitions in sports such as bodybuilding, swimming, athletics, and weightlifting.
These are also individual sports, and there have been many cases of doping at various levels and for various reasons, both subjective and objective. Among these, bodybuilding has received more attention because many athletes have been banned from competition, and there have even been instances where the national team roster was reshuffled following random doping tests.
Simply put, bodybuilding has been under the scrutiny of anti-doping authorities. Unfortunately, however, at the 2024 National Bodybuilding Championships, there were still four cases of doping tests. The official notification regarding these positive doping cases will be sent by the Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine to the athletes' governing bodies this March. To ensure confidentiality, the identities of the athletes with positive doping tests are being kept secret.
This once again demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain a "clean" environment in top-level sports competition. Clearly, athletes are well aware that their sport is under the scrutiny of anti-doping agencies. And theoretically, they should be even more cautious in their decisions regarding medication and nutrition to ensure they don't test positive for doping. They certainly have enough knowledge to understand this, yet for some reason, they still test positive for doping. This, of course, affects the athlete's career at the highest level and the image of the sport.
It's no coincidence that many sports and sports medicine experts agree that the first and foremost step in addressing the doping issue lies in the awareness of coaches and athletes. Sports doctor Pham Manh Hung, who has worked with national and Hanoi-based sports teams for many years, recounted that through his interactions with athletes, he observed that their knowledge of doping prevention and control improves with consistent education. According to Dr. Pham Manh Hung, the doctors and medical staff who regularly interact with athletes and coaches are the most effective in influencing athletes on this issue. However, not all teams implement this effectively.
In fact, the statistics on Vietnamese athletes being involved in doping, while not fully reflecting the extent of doping, whether intentional or unintentional, in Vietnamese sports, are still cause for concern.
At the 9th National Sports Games in 2022, test results showed 17 out of nearly 200 samples tested positive for doping. At the 31st SEA Games in 2022, the Vietnamese athletics team had 6 doping cases. Furthermore, pre-SEA Games 31 testing revealed 6 doping cases among bodybuilders. And now, there are 4 more doping cases at the 2024 National Bodybuilding Championships...
How can we monitor and prevent this?
In an interview with the media, the Director of the Vietnam Sports Department, Dang Ha Viet, affirmed that Vietnamese sports administrators never advocate for the use of doping in sports training or competition. The important issue is to find ways to keep athletes away from doping. This will help prolong their competitive careers and, further, elevate the status of Vietnamese sports.
Among the solutions proposed by the sports sector, for several years now, the Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine has implemented anti-doping awareness programs at numerous tournaments and national teams. Specifically, in the 2024 national competition system, the Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine conducted anti-doping awareness programs at national championships in swimming, wrestling, diving, sepak takraw, judo, wushu, jujitsu, kurash, bodybuilding, volleyball, sepak takraw, shooting, taekwondo, weightlifting, and the Paralympic Games in badminton, table tennis, weightlifting, and tennis. Even local sports management units, including Hanoi , have proactively invited anti-doping experts to provide information and share experiences with coaches and athletes.
And in 2025, implementing a program to raise awareness about doping prevention at national championships is also considered a key task of the Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine.
Of course, relying solely on public awareness campaigns will not be enough to completely stop doping cases. Doping testing at national sports competitions in Vietnam still needs to be prioritized. However, the funding for this at the Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine is currently limited. The center only has sufficient funds to conduct around 30 doping tests per year at national sports competitions, a number that is truly insufficient compared to the need for doping testing at these events.
Therefore, the center can only collect doping samples at certain tournaments in individual sports with a high risk of doping. Meanwhile, the number of localities that allocate funds for doping testing for their own athletes is very small. And as many experts have noted, the low number of doping samples collected at national sports tournaments is also a "bottleneck" in the fight against doping in Vietnamese sports.
It is highly likely that, upon learning this, many coaches and athletes will become careless in their use of medication and nutrition. This will lead to inaccurate competition results, failing to reflect reality and, further, resulting in inaccuracies in the selection of athletes for the national team.
Therefore, conducting more doping tests than in the past, combined with continuous public awareness campaigns and the self-awareness of coaches and athletes, will be crucial factors in reducing the headaches Vietnamese sports face regarding doping, whether intentional or unintentional.
No doping samples have been taken at the national volleyball tournament.
The 2025 National Volleyball Championship will begin on March 22nd. The Vietnam Center for Doping and Sports Medicine stated that, according to the plan, doping tests will not be conducted on athletes participating in the National Volleyball Championship. Currently, testing is not being carried out in team sports and is focusing on individual events. (Minh Khue)
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