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Last week, the Botswana National Anti-Doping Committee held training for long-serving escorts to promote them to doping control officers. The arrival of the newly promoted DCO may be seen as a positive move as Botswana continues to fight against the increasing number of doping cases. In the first four months of this month, the Botswana National Olympic Committee announced that it had recorded two new doping cases.
The Botswana Anti-Doping Agency recently arrested 400m athlete Ditiro Nzamani of Sportview Track Club and Pertunia Gaegopolwe of Lions Den.
According to the BNOC, Nzamani and Gaegopolwe were found to have taken stanozolol and methandrostenone metabolites respectively. These substances are prohibited under the 2024 World Anti-Doping Agency Prohibited Substances List along with anabolic androgenic steroids. The two athletes have now been provisionally suspended by the BNOC pending “processing in accordance with the Botswana Anti-Doping Rules and the World Anti-Doping Code.”
The new DCO will be tasked with ensuring Botswana’s sport remains doping-free, given the increasing number of doping cases in the country. They will be at the forefront of the country’s anti-doping war and will be responsible for “on-site management of sample collection”.
Botswana anti-doping official Ntebogang Khubamang said the newly appointed officials had served as escorts or assistant DCOs for many years before being promoted. As escorts, their duties are to “initiate the sample collection process by notifying the athlete until the athlete is handed over to the DCO of the Doping Control Station who conducts the official procedure.”
“We have had escorts for more than 10 years. Now, they are more experienced and confident about international testing standards. This upgrade is an incentive for them and to be honest, they should be promoted to DCOs,” Khubamang explained.
“When recruiting officers, the selection criteria are quite random, and we haven’t done that for a long time because the number of people in our team is enough to meet our range of sports and athletes. But for doping control officers, the most important thing is to have a volunteer heart, love sports or have sports experience, and most importantly, be able to handle confidential information, and they have done very well in this regard in the past few years.
“We have never had to recruit new people in 13 years and because of their commitment to the department, we have not faced any staffing challenges in executing our mission. We are so grateful to this team and we are where we are today because of their endless support and commitment. We only recruit new people when the staff shortage affects the quality of our work, which fortunately has not been the case for us,” she further said.
Speaking about these recent doping cases, Kubaman said that as an office, they are doing their part to ensure that both sports associations and athletes are fully informed about doping issues. She said athletes need to be encouraged to be more involved and interested in learning about anti-doping issues because it is their right and responsibility to be informed about these issues.
“We have seen great progress in the association inviting offices to conduct educational sessions for athletes during camps, but we also need to see more athletes showing interest in clean and fair play. We can only advocate for endless discussions and education for our athletes and their support staff so that we can curb these increasing numbers that keep appearing among our athletes,” said Khubamang.
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