Sport Ireland Anti-Doping has published its Annual Review for 2022, during which there were no anti-doping violations reported and a record number of tests carried out.  

 In all, 1,415 tests were carried out by Sport Ireland Anti-Doping in 2022, with samples collected from 32 different sports. That is an increase of five per cent from 2021, to make it the highest number of annual tests ever completed since the programme began. While the tests were collected across four more sports than the previous year.   

The Sport Ireland Anti-Doping Programme was established in 1999. It commenced operation in January 2000. The purpose of the Programme is to ensure that sport is drug free. It does this through three key elements; testing, research and education.  

Sport Ireland continues to emphasise the importance of education as a primary deterrent to doping in sport. In 2022, 1,800 users completed the Sport Ireland Anti-Doping e-learning programme.  

Additionally, the Anti-Doping Unit of Sport Ireland offer all National Governing Bodies of Sport the opportunity to train staff or volunteers from their organisation as Anti-Doping Tutors. In 2022 10 tutors were trained and accredited, from seven different NGBs. There were 29 online or face-to-face seminars completed by Sport Ireland’s Anti-Doping Unit, involving close to 1,000 athletes, students and athlete support personnel.    

Athletes were advised they could check the status of all pharmaceutical products purchased in the Republic of Ireland on the Eirpharm database (in January 2023 this was replaced with medcheck.sportireland.ie), and in 2022 there were 16,319 searches on this site. This figure is a significant increase on the 11,821 searches the previous year.   

There were no anti-doping violations reported in 2022, with the number of unsuccessful attempts on athletes on the registered testing pool down by seven per cent from 2021.