A Pool of Eight

The rules already reach your club

If you are a member of a club affiliated to its national federation, you are a person FIP's anti-doping rules apply to. So is anyone who enters a competition that club organises, wherever it is held. The rulebook that governs the international game is a rulebook you sit inside, and you have probably never opened it.

The scope article of those rules opens wide. It applies to the federation and to each of its national federations. It applies to athletes and support personnel who are members of a national federation or of any body affiliated to one, clubs, teams, associations and leagues among them. It applies also to athletes and support personnel who register or take part in that capacity in the events, competitions and other activities those bodies organise, convene, authorise or recognise, "wherever held".

The passage immediately after the scope article narrows the field. Within the overall pool of athletes bound by the rules, two categories, the federation's testing pool and its leading ranking positions, "shall be considered to be International-Level Athletes", and it is to them that the rulebook's specific provisions for that category apply, testing, therapeutic use exemptions, whereabouts and results management among them.

Those two passages are consecutive paragraphs of one document. Being bound by the rules and being subject to the testing provisions are two different things, and it is the rulebook that separates them, not us.

What the ITA says it is building

The ITA replied on 21 August, through a named spokesperson, Marta Nawrocka, and answered all six questions put to it five days earlier. The exchange runs in full alongside this piece.

A testing pool for international padel players is being established now. It "will initially include eight athletes", and its purpose is to support no-advance-notice out-of-competition testing. The pool is under construction and eight is where it starts.

The ITA attached a caveat, in its own words. "Importantly, inclusion in a testing pool does not define the limits of testing. Athletes who are subject to the applicable anti-doping rules may be selected for testing in competition or out of competition, including without advance notice."

Testing is not conducted at every FIP-sanctioned event. The ITA develops the programme from an annual risk assessment of padel and identifies from it the international events and athletes to be prioritised. The assessment is made in accordance with the principles of the World Anti-Doping Code and the International Standard for Testing and Investigations. Sanctioned is not the same as tested.

The whereabouts system is not yet running. The necessary processes, including WADA's Anti-Doping Administration and Management System, are "currently being put in place following FIP's recent admission as a Code Signatory", and the athletes concerned will receive their instructions directly once the system is operational. They have not received them yet.

A therapeutic use exemption process is in place for athletes subject to FIP's rules, and FIP has delegated the management of it to the ITA as part of the same agreement.

To date, no anti-doping rule violation has been recorded in padel under the programme the ITA manages. That is a nil return from a programme the agency itself describes as "still at an early stage of implementation", and it is a narrower statement than a clean record.

The sixth question we put was where the tested tier ends. The ITA answered by pointing past the tier to the rules themselves, and its account of them matches the rulebook. "The scope of the anti-doping rules is broader than the group of athletes whom the ITA prioritises for international testing." International-Level Athletes, for the purposes of those rules, "include athletes in an FIP Registered Testing Pool or Testing Pool, as applicable, as well as athletes ranked within the top 50 positions of the relevant FIP men's or women's rankings". Risk assessment then determines how testing is deployed among the athletes and competitions under FIP's international jurisdiction. "There is therefore not a single competition level below which anti-doping rules simply cease to apply." National anti-doping organisations may also test padel players in accordance with the rules and testing strategies applicable in their own countries.

The two dates, and what a signatory signs

Two dates attach to padel joining the World Anti-Doping Code. WADA published the release on 15 July 2026, and the Spanish wires carried it the same day: EFE, filed by Redacción deportes, 15 July. The status itself took effect on 16 July.

Luigi Carraro, FIP's president, put it this way in the Spanish original:

«Este es un hito histórico para nuestra Federación y para la comunidad global del pádel. El camino para convertirnos en signatarios del Código de la AMA ha requerido compromiso, disciplina y perseverancia. Hoy nos enorgullece situar al pádel junto a los deportes más respetados del mundo en la lucha por un deporte limpio, garantizando que nuestros atletas compitan en un entorno justo, transparente y confiable.»

This is a historic milestone for our federation and for the global padel community. The road to becoming signatories of the WADA Code has required commitment, discipline and perseverance. Today we are proud to place padel alongside the most respected sports in the world in the fight for clean sport, guaranteeing that our athletes compete in an environment that is fair, transparent and trustworthy. The translation is ours.

Signatories, in the words of Andrew Maggio of WADA's media relations and communications team, "commit to following and implementing the Code", which "works in conjunction with eight International Standards". The Code sets the framework, and those documents set out how it is operated.

What the signature binds is FIP's own sanctioned competitions. The federation's announcement names them: the FIP World Cup, the Qatar Airways Premier Padel Tour, the Cupra FIP Tour and the Hexagon World Series.

The same page gives FIP's stated reason for signing when it did. "Being a WADA Code Signatory is a fundamental requirement for recognition within the Olympic Movement." This is part of the paperwork it takes.

Compliant until listed otherwise

One sentence from WADA carries the difference between signing and being audited. "Unless stated otherwise... all Signatories are considered compliant." Compliance is a default status, held until an instrument says otherwise.

The instrument is a public list, and it is a short one. The global list of non-compliant signatories names two bodies and no others. One is a national anti-doping organisation, Russia NADO, given its full name on the page as the Russian Anti-Doping Agency. The other is an international federation, the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation. FIP is not on it.

The machinery that already existed

None of this began in July. The ITA has delivered FIP's anti-doping programme since January 2025, eighteen months before the signature, under a collaboration agreement set out on the agency's own partner page. That page lists the delegated services: in-competition testing; out-of-competition testing; intelligence and investigations; risk assessment; test distribution planning; education; athlete biological passport administration; regulatory compliance; therapeutic use exemptions; results management; whereabouts failures; long-term storage and re-analysis; and one listed simply as Reveal.

A young international federation handed its whole anti-doping function to the agency built to run exactly that. FIP's own anti-doping rules came into force on 1 April 2025, fifteen months before the signature. The signature came last in that sequence. Very little about any of it is the behaviour of a sport doing the minimum.

It is also a list of mandates. A delegated service is a permission and a duty, not a record of activity. The ITA is mandated to run out-of-competition testing in padel. Whether any out-of-competition test has been conducted, on whom and how often, is a separate question only the ITA can answer. So we asked.

What the rules ask of a national federation

The same rules that reach the clubs set out what they ask of a national federation. Article 18 requires each one to incorporate the rules into its governing documents, either directly or by reference, to recognise the authority of the national anti-doping organisation in its own country, and to assist "as appropriate" with that organisation's implementation of the national testing programme for the sport. The cascade is drafted and specific, and the article uses the term National-Level Athletes in terms.

Two limits on that, both ours to state. The first is that a drafted obligation is not a performed one. Whether any given national federation has incorporated FIP's rules, and whether any national anti-doping organisation has put padel into a national testing programme, is not documented in the material we have read. That is the next instalment.

The second is the date on the front of the document. These rules were adopted on 31 March 2025 and came into force on 1 April 2025, fifteen months before FIP signed the Code. It is the version the federation publishes, and that is the whole of what can be said about it here.

The date

There is one figure the ITA did not provide, and it gave its reason. FIP became a signatory only in July, its Code-compliant testing programme is at an early stage, and for that reason the agency does not think an interim breakdown of the 2026 programme would "provide a representative picture of the program once fully implemented". Consolidated information on its 2026 testing activities for FIP, testing figures included, will be published as part of the agency's annual reporting in March 2027.

Every other question we put was answered, and that one came with a reason and a date. March 2027 is when the sport finds out what its first Code-compliant year actually looked like.

How this was reported

This piece is built from correspondence and from primary documents, and the record of it is as follows. On 16 August 2026 ASC put factual questions to WADA, to the International Testing Agency, to UK Anti-Doping and to Sport Ireland. WADA replied on 17 August, through Andrew Maggio of its media relations and communications team, quoted here by name. WADA's release of 15 July carries a date line reading Releases 15 Jul 2026 and a headline reading "WADA welcomes International Padel Federation as newest World Anti-Doping Code Signatory". The effective date of 16 July comes from two places, neither of them the release, which makes no effective-date claim at all: FIP's own announcement page, dated julio 16, 2026, and an email from WADA's media office on 17 August answering a question of ours. The ITA replied at 14:47 on 21 August, through Marta Nawrocka, answering all six questions put to it; that exchange is published in full alongside this piece. FIP's anti-doping rules were retrieved on 21 August from the federation's own documents page as a 56-page PDF and text-extracted; the scope article and Article 18 were read closely and the remainder of the document searched. The rulebook is paraphrased here more often than it is quoted, and the paraphrases were checked clause by clause against the document. UK Anti-Doping acknowledged automatically on 16 August and replied substantively on 24 August; its answers concern the domestic picture and are held for the next instalment. Sport Ireland had not replied by 3 September. Every quotation here comes from an on-record reply to a question of ours, from a published release, or from the rulebook itself. Where a question has not been answered, the piece records that and stops there.

What readers can add

If you play, coach, referee or run competitions, we would like to know what anti-doping looks like from where you stand. Being tested at a national open, sitting through an education session, or playing competitively for years and never once being approached. All of it is useful and none of it is a complaint we are collecting. Write to editors@alboransocialclub.com, and we will say whether anything is on the record before it is.

Disclosures: none triggered on this piece.