Whereabouts and testing pools

What whereabouts is, and where the rule lives

Out-of-competition testing only works if the tester can find the athlete without warning. Whereabouts is the machinery that makes that possible: a standing obligation on a defined group of athletes to declare, in advance and in writing, where they will be.

Almost none of it is in the Code. Code Article 5.5 does no more than require athletes placed in a Registered Testing Pool to provide whereabouts information "in the manner specified in the International Standard for Testing and Investigations". The detail sits in that standard — and it has moved twice, which is why undated citations on this subject are worthless. Through the March 2020 edition the rules were in Annex I. The 2021 and 2023 editions moved them into the body of the standard at Article 4.8. From 1 January 2027 they are at Article 4.10, split into named sub-articles, in a standard that has itself been renamed: the International Standard for Testing and Investigations becomes simply the International Standard for Testing. The 2027 text was approved by the WADA Executive Committee on 5 December 2025.^{[1] [2] [3] [5]}

The threshold has moved as well. The harmonised three-strikes system arrived with the 2009 Code, which used an eighteen-month window; the 2015 Code cut it to twelve, and it has been twelve ever since. Cases decided before 2015 — the Belgian tennis cases of 2009 in particular — must be described on the rule that applied to them.^[6] [7]

This page is the machinery of location. The Code, the Prohibited List, the eleven violations and their sanctions are on anti-doping, and the exemption machinery is on therapeutic use exemptions. Whereabouts filings and TUE files sit in the same database under the same data-protection standard, and that is the only overlap.^[8]

The pools — there is more than one

Anti-doping organisations are told to build a pyramid. Federations and national agencies "should consider adopting a 'pyramid' or 'tiered approach', placing Athletes into different whereabouts pools… depending upon how much whereabouts information it needs", and must be able to demonstrate to WADA that they have taken "an appropriate risk-based approach". Only the top tier carries the Code Article 2.4 violation. Everything below it carries consequences the body sets for itself.^[2]

Tier one, the Registered Testing Pool, is defined as the pool of highest-priority athletes, established separately at international level by federations and at national level by national agencies. The 2027 standard describes it as athletes the body plans to test "at least three (3) times per year Out-of-Competition", and lists the criteria a body shall consider when selecting: athletes in its biological passport modules; athletes for whom insufficient whereabouts information is available from other sources; athletes in a team sport during periods with no team activities; athletes serving a period of ineligibility; and — a mechanism worth naming — athletes in a lower pool who fail to comply with that pool's requirements. Failure promotes you upward.^[2]

WADA can override a body's selection. Bodies must list their criteria in the database, and if WADA is not satisfied that those criteria are "sufficient and proportionate to the Risk Assessment undertaken", it may require them to be adjusted or require named athletes to be added.^[2]

Tier two, the Testing Pool, covers athletes the body plans to locate and test at least once a year out of competition. They must give an overnight address, a competition schedule and regular training locations — but no 60-minute slot, which is the operative difference, and the standard states in terms that "Athletes in a Testing Pool are not subject to the requirements of Code Article 2.4." Consequences for late or inaccurate filing are set by the body itself and must be "appropriate and proportionate", and may include elevation into the Registered Testing Pool. From 2027 these athletes must file by the 15th of the month before the quarter, must be notified in writing when they are removed from the pool, and must upload a passport-style photograph.^[2]

Tier three, called "other pools" in 2023 and renamed the general pool in 2027, covers lower-risk athletes who receive some out-of-competition testing and carry no whereabouts obligation at all; the body locates them from open sources, national federations, training-camp information and competition entries.^[2]

An athlete can be in a federation pool and a national pool at once, and the standard's answer is that they should be in only one, to avoid duplication. Where both bodies include them, each must notify in writing and the two must agree between themselves who is the whereabouts custodian. If they cannot agree they explain to WADA, and "WADA will decide based on the best interests of the Athlete. WADA's decision will be final and may not be appealed." Where the pools differ, the athlete files once, to one custodian, and complies with whichever pool's requirements are greater. Both bodies must review membership periodically and increase pool sizes in the run-up to an Olympic Games, Paralympic Games or world championship.^[2]

The filing, and the 60-minute slot

Athletes in a Registered Testing Pool make quarterly filings covering every day of the coming quarter. The deadline changes in 2027, and the change is a genuine tightening that has gone largely unremarked. Under the 2023 standard the filing is due on the first day of the quarter, and a comment permits a body to request the 15th of the preceding month while stating that no consequences follow from missing it. The 2027 standard makes the earlier date operative: filings are due by 15 December, 15 March, 15 June and 15 September, and "A failure to submit a Whereabouts Filing by the 15th day of the month preceding the quarter shall result in an apparent Filing Failure being issued to the Athlete."^[2]

The mandatory contents, for each day of the quarter: one specific 60-minute time slot between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m. at a stated location; the full address of the place the athlete will stay overnight, down to the room number; the name and address of training locations with general time frames — morning being 5 a.m. to noon, afternoon noon to 6 p.m., evening 6 to 11 p.m.; and the competition schedule with dates, times and addresses. New in 2027 are a passport-style photograph uploaded to the athlete profile, to validate identity at testing, and — mandatory — "A personal phone number which they can be contacted on should the Anti-Doping Organization decide to call them within the last five (5) minutes of the 60-minute time slot." A postal and email address for formal notice is also required; post is deemed received seven days after sending.^[2]

Detail must be sufficient "to enable the DCO to find the location, to gain access to the location, and to find the Athlete at the location with no advance notice". The standard's own example of what will not do is memorable: declarations such as "running in the Black Forest" are insufficient and likely to produce a filing failure. Sports with no fixed training location — road cycling, road running — require the address where the session starts and finishes. An athlete not training must say so, and specify whether it is "a rest day, travel, vacation, injured or other". Where travel runs overnight with no address, travel details are filed instead.^[2]

The slot itself is the heart of the system, and its purpose is stated defensively: it exists "to strike a balance between the need to locate the Athlete for Testing and the impracticality and unfairness of making Athletes potentially accountable for a Missed Test every time they depart from their previously-declared routine." The athlete chooses the hour and the place — home, training venue, competition, workplace, school. Access is the athlete's problem: where the chosen location is a hotel, a gated community or a building with a reception desk or security guard, "It is the Athlete's responsibility to ensure accessibility… with no advance warning to the Athlete."^[2]

Three rules around the hour catch people out. Being found later the same day does not cure a miss: the athlete "will be liable for an apparent Missed Test even if they are located later that day and a Sample is successfully collected". Arriving part-way through does cure it — the officer should collect the sample rather than record a failed attempt, though a pattern of it is to be investigated as possible evasion or tampering. And leaving once collection has begun is a different and graver matter, pursued as a refusal or failure to submit to sample collection under Code Article 2.3, even if collection runs past the hour. The officer, for their part, must stay for the remainder of the hour and do what is reasonable to find the athlete.^[2]

Testing is not confined to the slot, and the 2027 standard goes further than merely saying so. The stated intent is not to limit testing or create a default period but to make clear when a failed attempt counts, to guarantee the athlete can be found at least once a day, to anchor the rest of the filing, and to generate intelligence — for instance where an athlete "regularly specifies time slots with large gaps between them, and/or changes their time slot and/or location at the last minute." From 2027 bodies shall attempt at least one of the three planned annual out-of-competition tests outside the nominated hour, may not make that attempt within an hour either side of it, and should try training locations before the overnight address.^[2]

Updates must be filed for any change of slot, overnight address, training location or competition schedule, as soon as the athlete knows and in any event before the original slot begins — and, critically, an athlete who moves that day's slot "must still submit to Testing during the original 60-minute time slot if they are located for Testing during that time slot."^[2]

The two failures, and how each is proved

There are two kinds of whereabouts failure and they are not the same thing. A filing failure is a failure to make an accurate and complete filing that enables the athlete to be located, or to update one so that it remains accurate; it often has nothing to do with any testing attempt, and can be no more than a late quarterly submission or an address that turns out not to exist. A missed test is a failure to be available at the location and time of the declared hour. Neither is a missed drug test in the ordinary sense of that phrase, because in neither case is any sample analysed.^[1] [4]

When each is deemed to occur is the most consequential technicality in the whole subject. A filing failure for incomplete information is deemed to occur on the first day of the quarter; where information proves inaccurate, on the first date it can be shown to be so. A missed test is deemed to occur on the date of the unsuccessful attempt. A failure discovered by an out-of-slot attempt can therefore be backdated by months — potentially outside the rolling twelve-month window — while a miss inside the hour cannot be moved at all.^[4]

Four elements must be proved for a filing failure: that the athlete was notified of pool inclusion, the filing requirement and the consequences; that they failed to comply by the deadline; for a second or third failure, that they were told of the previous one and, where it revealed a fixable deficiency, that they were required to fix it "within 48 hours after receipt of the notice" and did not; and that the failure was at least negligent. Negligence is presumed once notification and non-compliance are shown, and the presumption "may only be rebutted by the Athlete establishing that no negligent behavior on their part caused or contributed to the failure."^[4]

Five elements must be proved for a missed test: that the notification warned of missed-test liability; that an officer attempted the test during the specified slot at the specified location; that during it the officer did what was reasonable "short of giving the Athlete any advance notice of the test"; that the prior-notice rule was complied with; and that non-availability was at least negligent, on the same presumption. Under the 2023 rules the telephone call is not an element — the results-management standard states that because a call is discretionary, "proof that a telephone call was made is not a requisite element of a Missed Test, and the lack of a telephone call does not give the Athlete a defense." The prior-notice rule itself is thin: all that is required is notice of one failure before a later one may be pursued, and it is "not necessary to complete the Results Management process with respect to the first".^[4]

The athlete has real procedural rights at this stage, and they are worth stating because coverage rarely does. The body handling the failure is the whereabouts custodian, not necessarily whichever organisation's officer uncovered it; if custody moves, so does the file. The athlete should be notified within fourteen days, told enough to respond meaningfully, given a reasonable deadline, told that three failures in twelve months is a violation, and told what other failures stand against them. They may then request an administrative review on the papers by one or more people not previously involved, who decide the question anew. And a decision not to record a failure is itself appealable — by WADA, by the federation or national agency, and by the body that uncovered it.^[4]

Three in twelve months: the violation and the sanction

Code Article 2.4 defines the violation as "Any combination of three missed tests and/or filing failures… within a twelve-month period by an Athlete in a Registered Testing Pool." The window is rolling and runs from the first failure relied on. If two more occur within it, the violation is committed "irrespective of any Samples successfully collected from the Athlete during that 12-month period"; if they do not, the first failure expires at the end of the twelve months and a new period begins from the next one. A single failure is not nothing, though: depending on the facts it could found a charge of evading sample collection or tampering instead.^[3] [4]

The clearest illustration that this is not a rule about missing drug tests is the oldest well-known case. A Flemish tribunal banned the tennis players Yanina Wickmayer and Xavier Malisse for a year each on 5 November 2009 — and Wickmayer's three failures were all filing failures, with no missed test at all, Malisse's two filing failures plus one miss. The threshold then in force in Flanders was three failures in eighteen months, not twelve, so the case cannot be described on today's rule. Nor did it end on its merits: a Brussels civil court barred execution of the bans in December 2009 on a fair-trial ground, the Belgian Council of State annulled the underlying Flemish provisions in February 2012, WADA withdrew its appeals, and the arbitration court then annulled the tribunal's decision. Three years, and no finding on the filings.^[18] [19]

The sanction is two years, reducible to a floor of one year on the athlete's degree of fault — and the flexibility disappears entirely "where a pattern of last-minute whereabouts changes or other conduct raises a serious suspicion that the Athlete was trying to avoid being available for Testing." "Up to two years" is the commonest formulation and it is wrong in the way that matters, because it implies there is no floor. The fault bands actually applied come from the Coleman award and are now quoted in tribunal decisions: high fault 20 to 24 months, medium 16 to 20, low 12 to 16.^[3] [23] Secondary commentary on the 2027 Code reports that fault will be assessed equally across all three failures, and that the first is treated as no less serious than the later ones; that wording could not be confirmed against the Code's own text, and the one-to-two-year band itself is not reported as changing.^[46]

Christian Coleman is the case to know, and there are two of them. In August 2019 the United States agency charged him over three failures dating from June 2018. Because a filing failure is deemed to occur on the first day of its quarter, two of the three backdated to 1 April of their respective years, putting the third one day outside the twelve-month window; the agency sought a formal interpretation from WADA and withdrew the charge on 2 September 2019. The tribunal that later heard the second case spelt out the irony: had the April 2019 attempt been made inside his declared hour it would have been a missed test dated that day, and inside the window. The rule that saved him was the one that treats filing failures more leniently in time.^[11] [12]

The second case ran to judgment. The World Athletics Disciplinary Tribunal imposed two years on 22 October 2020, and opened its reasons with a sentence that exists because the point is so widely missed: "there is no suggestion that the Athlete has ever taken any Prohibited Substance and we wish to make that clear at the outset." The third failure was Christmas shopping through his hour on the assumption that an officer would telephone. On appeal the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the violation and cut the ban from 24 months to 18 — on fault, not on a technicality — because although a call during the hour was not required by the rules, "it was nevertheless reasonable for the Athlete to expect such a call, as a matter of standard practice among other Doping Control Officers."^{[11] [13] [14]}

Read the 2027 standard against that reasoning and the line is direct: the phone number becomes mandatory and the officer should call in the last five minutes. The comment nonetheless preserves the athlete's exposure — an unsuccessful call "shall not constitute a defence to liability for a Missed Test."^[2]

Other cases, and the range is real. Fred Kerley received the full two years in February 2026 with no fault reduction; Penelope Oleksiak accepted two years in November 2025; Alysha Newman received 20 months in April 2026, plus a separate two-month backdating for results-management delay; Vlad Dascălu's 17 months were confirmed at CAS in March 2025 on medium fault; accepted sanctions in the United States have run to 18 months for a wrestler and 16 for a gymnast and a cyclist. The public violations register of the International Testing Agency carries Article 2.4 entries from Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, India, Mongolia, France, Brazil, Austria and Colombia. In tennis the case to cite is Jenson Brooksby — 18 months in October 2023, backdated to July that year.^{[22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]}

Two cases are widely cited and should not be. Serena Williams has never been charged with a whereabouts violation — no sanction, no decision, no tribunal finding of any kind, and she appears in the tennis Registered Testing Pool in good standing as at March 2026. What happened in June 2018 was an officer arriving at her home outside her declared hour; no sample was taken and no failure was recorded, because an out-of-slot attempt cannot be one. When she said in June 2026 that the rules had changed so that missing a test outside the window now counts, the integrity agency corrected her publicly: "If a tester is unable to reach a player outside of their allocated hour, it is not considered a strike… it is there to protect players, not to trip them up." She is a useful illustration of two things — that the out-of-slot attempt is not a strike, and that even elite athletes inside the system misunderstand it — but she is not a whereabouts case. Individual strikes below three are confidential and never published, so the verified finding is that no charge or decision exists, not that no strike ever has.^{[15] [16] [17]}

And Lizzie Armitstead was not cleared of doping, because there was never a doping allegation. Of three charged failures the first was voided at a CAS hearing on 21 July 2016 — the officer had not made the required reasonable attempts to find her; her phone was on silent and hotel staff would not give out her room number — leaving two, below the threshold, and therefore no violation. There is no published award and no case number, because a decision finding no violation is not disclosed without the athlete's consent.^[21]

Who runs it, and who can be blamed

Federations and national agencies run pools in parallel, on their own criteria, under WADA's supervision, and are required to coordinate selection, removal and testing "to avoid duplication and maximize use of resources" — and then to consider adding more athletes with the resources freed up. Pool membership is shared and maintained through ADAMS, the anti-doping administration and management system, which the standard requires bodies to use; filings are consequently "automatically available through ADAMS to WADA and other relevant Anti-Doping Organizations with overlapping Testing Authority." Access is restricted to authorised staff on a need-to-know basis, to WADA, and to bodies with testing authority over the athlete. New in 2027, the database must record the date an athlete enters a pool and the date they leave it.^[2] [8]

The volume of traffic is rarely appreciated. The United States agency reported 2,680 athletes filing in 2024, producing 1,974,008 whereabouts updates across 26,495 unique locations — an average of 5,393 updates a day, in one country.^[9]

Responsibilities can be delegated in every direction and liability cannot. A federation may delegate to a national agency with its agreement, or to a national federation or a doping control coordinator; a national agency may delegate to a national federation, a coordinator or another body. Where no appropriate national agency exists, the National Olympic Committee assumes the role. Where WADA determines that a body is not discharging its whereabouts responsibilities, it may reassign them. But the delegating body "remains ultimately responsible for the acts and/or omissions of such entity", and national federations "must use best efforts to assist", including by making provision in their own rules.^[2]

The athlete may likewise delegate the filing to a coach, manager or national federation with that party's agreement — and it buys them nothing if it goes wrong. Each athlete "remains ultimately responsible at all times for filing accurate and complete whereabouts and for being available for Testing… whether they make each filing personally or delegate the task to a third party." The International Testing Agency puts it to athletes without softening: delegating "will not be a defence in the scope of a whereabouts failure, even if it is proven that your delegate actually made a mistake."^[2] [8]

Above all of this sit the event organisers. For periods when athletes come under a major event organiser's testing authority, that organiser may either access existing filings for the period or adopt event-specific whereabouts rules with their own consequences, "as it deems necessary and proportionate". Sport-specific integrity units run their own pools inside the same framework — the Athletics Integrity Unit publishes the international athletics pool quarterly, at 361 names in the third quarter of 2026.^[2] [10]

The challenges: Strasbourg, Belgium and the regulators

The leading judgment is European and it went against the athletes — but not in the way it is usually reported. In Fédération nationale des associations et syndicats de sportifs and Others v. France, decided by a Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights on 18 January 2018, the national federation of athletes' associations and unions, the rugby, football, handball and basketball players' unions and ninety-nine individual professional players, together with the cyclist Jeannie Longo in a joined application, challenged the French whereabouts regime under Article 8 and under Article 2 of Protocol No. 4. The judgment exists only in French, and everything quoted below is taken from the Registrar's own press release rather than from that text.^[30] [31]

The Court held unanimously that there was no violation of Article 8 — but it first held that there was an interference, and that finding is the strongest judicial statement of the burden that exists anywhere. The applicants "were obliged to provide a public authority with precise and detailed information on their place of residence and daily movements seven days a week" and "sometimes had no choice but to stay at home for this daily time slot"; this requirement of transparency and availability, "which reduced the immediate personal autonomy of those concerned", was enough to engage the Article. Accounts that say Strasbourg found no interference with privacy have dropped the half of the judgment that matters.^[30]

The justification then followed the familiar path. The Court expressly dismissed the argument that anti-doping serves the economic interests of sport, locating the aim in the protection of health — of professionals, of amateurs and "in particular youth" — and competitive fairness in the rights of others, because doping "unfairly eliminated competitors of the same level who did not have recourse to them". On necessity it found a broad consensus among medical, governmental and international authorities. In the balance it "did not underestimate the impact" and accepted that the applicants bore obligations not imposed on the majority of the active population — against which it weighed that the mechanism established a legal framework valuable to the athletes themselves, that they had to accept a fair share of necessary constraints, and, decisively on the evidence, that "the applicants had not shown that testing confined to training venues and respecting private time would suffice".^[30]

On freedom of movement the Court did not reject the claim; it held Article 2 of Protocol No. 4 inapplicable — a different and stronger disposition, and the direct answer to surveillance framing. The location was "freely chosen by them" and the obligation was "more of an interference with their privacy than a surveillance measure"; the measures "could not be equated with the electronic tagging" used as an alternative to imprisonment or house arrest; and the athletes had not been prevented from leaving their country, merely obliged to say where they would be when they arrived.^[30]

The Belgian episode is misreported in three ways at once. It was 2009, not 2010; it was sixty-five athletes relying on EU privacy law and Article 8; and it never reached the Court of Justice of the European Union. The Flemish whereabouts provisions were indeed annulled — but not until February 2012, and on a domestic administrative-competence ground, that only the Flemish Government and not a departmental secretary general could make them; WADA then withdrew its appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport on 29 March 2012 for want of a legal basis. Meca-Medina, decided in 2006, is the doctrinal frame for reviewing sporting rules under EU law; it is not a whereabouts ruling.^[20] [18]

The live argument has moved to data protection. The Article 29 Working Party issued a formal opinion on WADA's privacy standard in April 2009; the European Data Protection Board issued Recommendations 1/2025 on the 2027 Code in February 2025. The Court of Justice has now ruled on anti-doping data — but on publication, not whereabouts, holding in July 2026 that national law may permit naming sanctioned athletes consistently with the data-protection regulation.^{[32] [33] [59]}

The obvious reader's question — why not just track the phone — has been answered from inside the system. WADA's own Ethics Panel concluded in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2018 that GPS geolocation of athletes for out-of-competition testing is "replete with ethical concerns", its benefits largely hypothetical and its privacy and security risks real, and that it should be neither mandated nor implemented on a voluntary basis.^[34]

The burden, evidenced — and the edge cases

Nobody publishes how many athletes are in the system. WADA's 2024 Testing Figures Report, 345 pages, contains no occurrence of "Registered Testing Pool", "Testing Pool" or "whereabouts", and its statistics hub carries no such series. A world total would mean summing roughly 190 national pools and more than sixty federation pools, most of which are never published. Any global figure in circulation is invented.^[29]

What is published, with the caveat that these are not like-for-like: Germany about 500 in a strict pool; France's groupe cible about 235, having peaked near 300 before Paris 2024; the Netherlands 218; Spain 310; Sweden about 300 across pool types; Norway about 100 on the whereabouts list alone; Canada 279 and India 347, both counted from published name lists; Kenya's national pool grown from 38 in 2022 to more than 300, plus 140 Kenyans in the international athletics pool; the United States 2,680 across a pool and a lighter programme; international athletics 361; biathlon 116. Each of those is that body's own published figure, on its own definition. Bodies checked and publishing nothing at all include the British, Australian, Irish, Swiss, Austrian, Danish, Finnish, Japanese, South Korean, Polish, Singaporean, South African, Brazilian and New Zealand agencies, and the IPC, UCI, FIFA, World Aquatics, ITF and World Rugby.^{[9] [10] [42] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55]}

How often does all this produce a violation? Rarely. WADA's rule-violation reports record 33 Article 2.4 violations in 2021, 33 in 2022 and 47 in 2023, against total violations of 1,388, 1,652 and 2,005 — about two per cent in each year. Thirty to fifty cases a year, worldwide, against a system that requires tens of thousands of athletes to declare their location every day. That ratio is the honest structural summary of the subject, and it cuts both ways: it is not an epidemic of evasion, and it is not evidence that the system is idle. Individual warnings sit an order of magnitude above the case count — Denmark recorded 17 filing-failure warnings and 11 missed-test warnings in 2024, producing one case; Ireland recorded no filing failures and nine missed tests across 2025.^{[29] [56] [57]}

The published research finds athletes both burdened and broadly supportive, and a page that reports only one half is misreporting it. A survey of 645 Danish elite athletes found a majority accepting the system as a necessity or a duty while around three quarters found reporting too time-consuming, over half feared a warning and about four in ten experienced it as surveillance. A Dutch study of 129 pool athletes found nearly half felt the hour limits their freedom, while most disagreed that the boundary between sport and private life was disturbed. The single most useful study for a neutral account is French-speaking and covers France, Belgium and Switzerland: 94 per cent considered whereabouts necessary and accepted it as part of an athlete's duties — while 74 per cent felt under surveillance, 54 per cent said it reduced the pleasure of being an athlete and 58 per cent perceived unequal application across countries and sports. A survey of 261 elite athletes from 51 countries found that athletes did not question the legitimacy of the rules; their concerns were about enforcement, privacy, efficiency and unequal conditions. A 2023 focus-group study across five countries found one of its three overarching themes to be the anxiety clean athletes feel about mistakes that could produce a violation.^{[35] [36] [37] [44] [58]}

Retirement. An athlete stays subject to Article 2.4 until every body that included them gives written notice that they no longer meet the criteria, or until they retire in accordance with the applicable rules and notify each body in writing. The period of retirement is disregarded for the twelve-month calculation, and pre-retirement failures can be combined with post-return ones — the standard's own worked example is two failures in the six months before retirement plus one in the first six months after coming back. Returning requires six months' prior written notice to the federation and the national agency before competing again, results obtained in breach being disqualified; WADA may waive it where strict application would be unfair.^{[1] [3] [4]}

Team sports work differently, and most accounts miss it. Where training is organised collectively, a body "may decide that it is sufficient to include Athletes as part of the team in a Testing Pool" — located through fixtures and team activities, with no 60-minute slot. The off-season breaks that: in periods with no team activities, or where a player is rehabilitating an injury, more individual information may be required, and if it is insufficient for no-advance-notice testing the body "shall" move them into the Registered Testing Pool. A squad may file collectively through a coach, manager or national federation, including for periods away from the team — and personal responsibility is unaffected. UEFA and FIFA issued a joint statement rejecting individual whereabouts requirements for footballers when the 2009 Code took effect.^[2] [20]

Para athletes get no accommodation, and the real finding runs opposite to expectation. The standard's only impairment-specific annex is limited by its own terms to the provision of a sample; there is no impairment-based extension, alternative filing method or accommodation anywhere in the whereabouts articles. But a 2025 study of 109 elite para athletes across 25 countries found that 71.6 per cent had never submitted whereabouts information at all, and 56.9 per cent had never been tested in their careers. Of the 31 in that study who had filed, 19.3 per cent reported difficulty updating and 38.7 per cent said the duty reduced their joy in the sport. A separate Swedish study found only 11 of 66 respondents had ever filed. The published criticism is about opaque selection and too little testing rather than too much: the authors note a lack of clarity in how para organisations define international-level athletes, and most Swedish respondents asked for more out-of-competition testing.^{[2] [38] [39]}

Where addressing and infrastructure fail, the system fails with them. WADA's own investigation into the Indian agency, published in July 2023, found that it "did not have satisfactory oversight and management of whereabouts filings by athletes in the registered testing pool", identifying 12 adverse analytical findings and 97 whereabouts failures across 70 athletes. The mechanism that carries this risk is categorisation: the athletics integrity unit ranks national federations by doping risk, with Category A in 2026 comprising Belarus, Bahrain, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Russia and Ukraine, each required to ensure at least three no-notice out-of-competition tests at least three weeks apart in the ten months before a major event. When a federation cannot meet it, athletes lose their place: twenty were declared ineligible for Tokyo 2020 on that basis,^[45] Nigeria alone losing 10 of 23 entrants. Jamaica's 2012 collapse remains the clearest documented case — 179 tests in the year, only 71 out of competition and 60 of those after the London Games, with WADA's director general describing five or six months in which there was "no effective operation. No testing." The IOC medical commission's chairman added the line that generalises it: "Jamaica is far from being alone." The addressing problem itself — training camps in places where street names and house numbers may not exist — is documented only in journalism, and no study measures failure rates against addressing quality. That gap is itself worth naming.^{[40] [41] [42] [43]}