What is the ITA?
The International Testing Agency is the body that international federations hire to run their anti-doping programmes for them. It became fully operational in July 2018 and is, in its own words, "constituted as a not-for-profit foundation, based in Lausanne, Switzerland" whose purpose is that "anti-doping testing becomes independent from sports organisations and national interests".[1] [3]
The point to be precise about, because it is widely got wrong, is that the ITA is not a subsidiary or an arm of WADA. It was established in the form of "a fully independent non-profit foundation under Swiss Law" by the International Olympic Committee, which its structure page identifies as the founding body; WADA sits on its board only as "a permanent non-voting observer" and, in the ITA's own account of the design, "cannot be the founding body of the ITA nor directly involved in its operations".[2]
WADA's role in relation to the ITA is regulatory and at arm's length: it writes the Code the ITA applies, and it vets and ratifies the ITA's board candidates. It does not run it.[2] [8]
What does the ITA govern or do?
The ITA governs nothing. It performs functions that would otherwise sit with a federation, under a delegation agreement, and the scope of each delegation is a matter of contract. Its published service list runs to testing, major event programmes, science and medical expertise, intelligence and investigations, risk assessment, test distribution planning, education, athlete biological passport administration, regulatory compliance, therapeutic use exemptions, results management, and long-term storage and re-analysis of samples.[3]
The delegation model is deliberately incremental. The UCI illustrates it: having created the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation in 2008 and kept results management in-house through its Legal Anti-Doping Service from 2013, it transferred operational anti-doping work — testing, TUE review, biological passport monitoring — to the ITA in 2021, and then handed over the prosecution of anti-doping rule violations and whereabouts failures with effect from 9 February 2026.[6] That last step is what separates cycling's arrangement from a testing-only contract.
Other federations delegate the whole programme at once: the International Skating Union did so in July 2025, its president describing the step as "ensuring full independence, transparency, and global expertise in the delivery of our Anti-Doping program".[5]
When was the ITA founded and where is it based?
The sequence has three distinct dates and they are often collapsed into one. The ITA traces its origin to the recommendations of Olympic Agenda 2020 and to the 2015 Olympic Summit; a Policy Steering Group convened by WADA was established in 2016 and recommended that the IOC be the founding body, a recommendation WADA's Foundation Board approved; the structure and board membership were approved by that Board in May 2017; and the agency became fully operational in July 2018.[1] [2]
The ITA is based at Avenue de Rhodanie 40B, 1007 Lausanne, Switzerland, in the same city as the IOC and the Court of Arbitration for Sport.[3] This page found no record on the ITA's own site of a rename since its establishment.
Note that the acronym ITA is also used on this site by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association, a separate and unrelated body; the two share nothing but the letters.
How is the ITA recognised?
The ITA's standing comes from two documents rather than from a charter provision. The first is the World Anti-Doping Code, which permits an anti-doping organisation to delegate testing and results management to a delegated third party while remaining responsible under the Code — the legal basis on which every federation contract with the ITA rests, and the reason a delegation changes who does the work without changing whose programme it is.[9]
The second is the ITA's own foundation deed and governance arrangement, which builds independence into the appointments. Board candidates are put forward by the sport movement to an independent vetting Nominations Panel established by WADA, which examines qualifications and integrity, and approved candidates then require ratification by the WADA Executive Committee. The Board delegates operational authority to the Director General, who has autonomous responsibility for "the actual and operational running and management of the ITA".[2]
WADA's part in that chain is vetting and observation, not control, and WADA's own compliance machinery continues to apply to the federation that delegated, not to the ITA in its place.[2] [9]
What does the ITA organise?
The largest single programme the ITA delivers is the anti-doping operation of the Olympic Games, which the IOC has delegated to it. At the Winter Olympic Games in Milano Cortina in 2026 the ITA collected 3,053 samples from 1,848 athletes — 63.4 per cent of competitors, against 55 per cent at Beijing 2022 — comprising 2,180 urine, 768 blood and 105 dried blood spot samples, with a team of twenty anti-doping experts across the venues.[4]
Pre-Games testing is coordinated rather than performed by the ITA: it reported that 92 per cent of participating athletes had been tested at least once in the six months before the Games by the anti-doping organisations responsible for them, following ITA recommendations.[4] That coordination function is where the whereabouts and testing pools regime does its work.
Away from the Games the ITA delivers championship and tour programmes on behalf of partners, including six consecutive Tour de France programmes for the UCI, and has run the masters programme of the International Masters Games Association since October 2022.[6] [7]
Who are its members?
The ITA has partners, not members. It states that it now serves "over 70 International Federations and Major Event Organisers, including all Olympic Events"; the partner logos displayed on its site include the IOC, WADA, the UCI and World Aquatics among some forty further federations and organisations.[1] [3] The two figures are not inconsistent — the site displays a selection — but this page could not retrieve a complete current partner list and does not enumerate one.
Governance is by a seven-member Foundation Board: four independent or neutral members including the Chair, one representing athletes, one representing the IOC and the national Olympic committees, and one representing international federations, with WADA present as a permanent non-voting observer.[2]
Because partnership is contractual, the scope varies by partner and can change. A federation may delegate testing only, results management only, or the entire programme, and the difference determines who an athlete's case is brought by before any appeal reaches the Court of Arbitration for Sport.[6] [5]
References
- ITA — Who is the ITA. Accessed September 2026.
- ITA — Structure of the ITA. Accessed September 2026.
- ITA — home page, services and contact. Accessed September 2026.
- ITA — All NOCs and 63% of Winter Olympians tested: the ITA summarises its anti-doping programme for Milano Cortina 2026. Accessed September 2026.
- ITA — Clear ice, clean sport: ISU delegates its entire anti-doping programme to the ITA, July 2025. Accessed September 2026.
- ITA — UCI further reinforces the independence of its anti-doping programme by delegating results management to the ITA. Accessed September 2026.
- ITA — Partner: International Masters Games Association (IMGA). Accessed September 2026.
- WADA — Governance. Accessed September 2026.
- WADA — Code Compliance by Signatories. Accessed September 2026.