Showing the Working

On 16 August we sent out a set of factual questions about anti-doping in padel. They included the body that writes the World Anti-Doping Code, and the agency that runs the testing. The questions were dull on purpose. How the testing programme is built. Whether there is a registered testing pool for padel. Where the tier that gets tested is defined, and by which document.

WADA replied on 17 August, through a named official in its media office. The International Testing Agency replied on 21 August, through a named spokesperson. The agency's answers run in full alongside the first piece, unedited and in the order they arrived, so that a reader can check our reading of them against the thing itself.

The series asks one question, and deliberately a narrow one. Padel came under the Code in July 2026. What we want to establish is what that framework reaches now, how far it is drafted to reach, and what would have to happen on the ground for it to reach further. That question has documents behind it and named people willing to answer it, and it can be answered in full on the record by the bodies inside it. That is part of why we picked it.

Where a document exists we read the document rather than somebody's account of it. FIP publishes its anti-doping rules as a 56-page PDF on its own documents page. We downloaded it, read the scope article and Article 18 closely, searched the rest, and quoted from it. Where a body answers a question we print the answer in the words it chose. Every load-bearing sentence carries a verdict before it is filed: documented, attributed, or open. Where we cannot see a thing with our own eyes, it does not get printed.

That last rule cost us a sentence this week. Part One was to have carried one more layer of corroboration on a point nobody disputes, cross-checking FIP's signatory status against WADA's public register. A machine reading of that page had reported the entry back to us. Twice, opening the page ourselves, we got the category heading and nothing under it. A text extraction is not a pair of eyes, so the sentence came out. The status is documented three other ways in the piece, and what went missing was a belt to go with the braces.

The three parts divide by question rather than by subject. Part One asks what a signature reaches, setting the testing agency's account of the programme it is building beside the rulebook the federation publishes. Part Two asks how an international rule travels into a game mostly played domestically. The rules oblige every national federation to take them into its own governing documents, and the question is what that looks like once performed, and where a reader could see it. Part Three is the numbers, and the numbers do not exist yet. The ITA has said that consolidated information on its 2026 testing for FIP, figures included, will be published in its annual reporting in March 2027, its stated reason being that an interim breakdown would not represent the programme once fully implemented.

Some of what this series will want to say, it cannot say yet. We do not know how many tests have been conducted in padel, in competition or out of it, because no figure has been published; the agency has given its reason and it is printed in its own words. We do not know whether any national federation has yet written the rules into its constitution, or whether any national anti-doping organisation has put padel into its testing programme. We do not know whether the rulebook FIP currently publishes, in force since 1 April 2025, is the version in force today. Those are gaps in what we can demonstrate. They will close, or they will not, and either way we will say so.

There is one thing readers can help with. 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.

FIP's anti-doping rules run to fifty-six pages and sit on the federation's own website, free to anyone who wants them.