World Anti-Doping Agency Dir General David Howman said that "the fight against doping is suffering because of a lack of funding," according to Owen Slot of the LONDON TIMES. Howman said, "With $25-30M [of funding] a year, WADA’s budget is less than some European footballers earn." He added, "The [Lance] Armstrong affair especially has shown that we’re dealing with a more and more highly developed process, a real conspiracy, with unwarranted pressures on teams." Of greatest concern was his reflection that "WADA isn’t in a position to tackle this type of sophisticated cheating." Howman made his point by noting that "WADA has not been able to hire new staff since '04, and suggested that if redundancies were required to keep WADA afloat, then its ability to catch up with the cheats in sport would be severely curtailed" (LONDON TIMES, 11/13). CYCLINGNEWS.com's Daniel Benson reported that while Howman "is aware of the financial constraints WADA finds itself in, he would still like to see the agency have a greater mandate in the future." Howman said, "We ought to have the power to enquiry ourselves. The second part of that is that if we have that ability then we can do something with the information. We'll have that process and the sanction process. It's a two-part system that we don't have now" (CYCLINGNEWS.com, 11/13). The AFP reported that "one way that the industry had helped so far was by making available to WADA samples of certain medications not yet available to the wider public to help develop tests more quickly and effectively when they are adapted for illegal use in sport." IOC President Jacques Rogge said, "The fight against doping is too big for a single organisation to tackle on its own." GlaxoSmithKline Senior VP Philip Thomson said that "the company was working on three new medicines and had provided samples from one to WADA to be tested" (AFP, 11/12).
