According to the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), more people are approaching the global sports anti-doping agency today than ever before with the intention of whistleblowing on major performance-enhancing drug scandals that are wrapping up almost every major professional and amateur sport today.
Craig Reedie, the president of this organization, told attendees of a major symposium in Switzerland that the organization is seeing an almost unprecedented amount of whistleblowers approaching them, shining a spotlight on major doping operations like the ones that were uncovered in Russia recently.
This uptick isn’t at all unexpected by the WADA, not by any stretch of the imagination. After all, this organization has always pursued whistleblower protections to help make it easier for people to bring major doping operations to light, and just recently they led off with a major digital initiative to encourage whistleblowers to come forward.
This major marketing push for the new “Speak Up” platform went out across all social media platforms, and encouraged whistleblowers to take advantage of a new 100% secure mobile application for iPhone and Android devices. Designed specifically to facilitate effortless communication – anonymous communication and secure communication – between whistleblowers in the WADA, this initiative has been hailed as a major success already and is likely only to become more and more successful in the future.
Whistleblowers have always been interested in protection and anonymity
The number one issue that always prevents whistleblowers from coming forward and revealing as much information as they have has always been – and likely will always be – a concern for whether or not they are going to enjoy full protection and anonymity from the organization that they are providing this sensitive information to.
Whistleblowers are obviously concerned with the goings-on that they are privy to or they wouldn’t be interested in whistleblowing in the first place, but all of these people are also interested in protecting themselves, protecting their family, and protecting their career as well as their future.
Without full protection and complete anonymity it just isn’t possible for whistleblowers to come forward as often as they otherwise would. There’s just no incentive when they know that they will be destroying their entire lives (and perhaps the lives of their family) if they do so without protection.
The WADA Speak Up initiative solves that problem
Not only does the new WADA Speak Up initiative solve the problem of protection and anonymity thanks to the security features and encryption built right into the mobile applications available for download (100% free of charge), but it also solves the problem of convenience of secure communication as well.
Everyone has a smart phone in their pocket, and that means that they have a tool that can be used to share information, photographs, video, audio, and so much more with people all over the world in the blink of an eye – and folks can use smartphone applications to disseminate this information almost instantly.
By making it really, really simple and straightforward to use, and by securing the information that is provided across the board with this new mobile application, the WADA has made major leaps forward in the push to get whistleblowers to reveal inside information about doping organizations like the ones that the Russians were caught with just a short while ago.
FIFA has also been rocked with a doping scandal involving the WADA, and it’s likely that the next Olympics are going to have the WADA fingerprints all over them as well. Whistleblowers are continuing to take advantage of these tools provided by the organization to make the playing field as level as possible, and though it will likely be impossible to squeeze performance-enhancing drugs and doping out of sports permanently, these kinds of efforts definitely curtail the practice for sure.
