FIFA Chief Medical Officer Jiri Dvorak Adamant That 'Doping Is Not A Significant Problem'

FIFA Chief Medical Officer Jiri Dvorak "has insisted that doping is not a significant problem" in football, according to the AAP. While "athletics has suffered some high-profile positive tests over the last two months and cycling began the year with that Lance Armstrong finally owned up to his spurious past, football has largely avoided any negative publicity with regards illicit drug-taking." Dvorak said that is "because there isn't much of it happening." Dvorak: "I am confident that there is no systematic doping in football. There is no systematic doping culture in football. I am confident of this. We do more than 30,000 sampling procedures every year and we have between 70 to 90 positive cases, most of them for marijuana and cocaine and we have also anabolic steroids, but these are individual cases" (AAP, 8/3).