LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Olympic leaders asked the World Anti-Doping Agency on Saturday to oversee a global system for tackling drug cheats with an independent body testing athletes and more powers for WADA to punish failing organizations.
After the IOC hosted a meeting of world sports officials, it upheld WADA's future role after months of strained relations amid fallout from the agency's call to ban Russia from the Rio de Janeiro Games because of state-backed doping.
The Olympic body called for WADA to lead a "more robust, more efficient, more transparent and more harmonized" anti-doping system, and promised more finance for the agency if it passed reforms.
WADA is now set to get "substantial additional powers," the agency's president Craig Reedie told reporters after a four-hour closed-door meeting.
Reedie said a new testing authority -- taking control of when and where athletes are tested from international and domestic sports federations -- could operate in time for the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Sports governing bodies are also set to lose control of banning athletes who dope -- with the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport to gain sanctioning powers.
WADA was asked to discuss the proposals at board meetings on Nov. 19-20 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Olympic leaders have long favoured taking control of drug testing from sports federations, and most of the proposals made Saturday repeated calls from a previous summit held in Lausanne one year ago.
However, WADA's possible role in a revamped and more independent system has been questioned since it appointed two investigations that detailed Russian doping and coverups.
Saturday's meeting went ahead despite a final report of the second WADA investigation panel, led by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, not being due until at least late-October.
McLaren's interim report in July provoked calls by WADA for Russia's expulsion from the Rio Games -- which Bach resisted -- and his final document should go into more detail of how a WADA-accredited laboratory manipulated home athletes' tainted samples at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.
Still, there was no mention of Russia or McLaren in the three-page document issued Saturday by the IOC.
The IOC made clear that WADA must seek to earn an increase on its annual budget of about $27 million, paid equally by the Olympic movement and national governments.
"The increase in financing depends on the implementation of the reforms by WADA and is based on the results provided by WADA after the review of the anti-doping system," the IOC statement said.
A new WADA investigations unit started work this month, led by a German former detective who worked on the first Russian investigation that focused on state-backed doping and coverups in track and field.
