Onus on athletes to let drug testers know where they are under “whereabouts” rules

Canadian swim star Penelope Oleksiak has been notified that she committed three whereabouts failures within a 12-month period between October 2024 and June 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

A chunk of an Olympic and Paralympic athlete’s life is spent telling drug testers where they will be every day and every night.

Failure to provide that information can damage an athlete’s eligibility to compete, even if they’ve never taken a banned substance.

Penny Oleksiak won’t be on Canada’s swimming team at world championship starting Saturday in Singapore after running afoul of “whereabouts” requirements.

From staying at a friend’s house overnight in the off-season to training in remote mountains, athletes must be found for testing in order to avoid sanctions.

The onus is on athletes to submit that information through the web-based Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) on a computer or on a mobile-phone app.

Athletes must provide, on a quarterly basis, their addresses (home, hotel or otherwise) and every day must have an overnight accommodation entry.

Also required is contact info, training and competition schedules and locations, time and location of school, work or medical appointments, and a 60-minute window each day that they’re available for testing.

If a grocery run or spontaneous decision to go to a movie conflicts with the 60-minute window an athlete offers as available for testing, ADAMS must be updated beforehand to provide an alternative hour.

But athletes can also be tested at any time and any place with no advance notice. Whereabouts information must be sufficiently detailed so they can be found for testing.

Swimming Canada said Oleksiak made “an administrative mistake” and failed to keep her whereabouts information up to date.

Whereabouts and ADAMS are constants in an elite athlete’s life.

“It is part of our job,” said Canadian race walker and Olympic medallist Evan Dunfee. “It is something that we sign up for.”

He recalled a 2017 vacation in Iceland where he was travelling in a recreational vehicle.

“We didn’t know where we were going to be stopping each night,” Dunfee recalled. “We were just going to drive until we found somewhere nice and set up shop.”

That required a consultation with the Canadian Centre For Ethics in Sport.

“I actually had to chat with CCES beforehand and say, ‘hey, how do I follow the rules in this situation?’ They said ‘to the best of your ability, update it as best you can.’ I think I ended up putting in my latitude and longitude,” Dunfee said.

The World Anti-Doping Code (WADA) defines a whereabouts failure as any combination of three missed tests or filing failures in a 12-month period, which the International Testing Agency stated Oleksiak did between October 2024 and June 2025.

Oleksiak withdrew from the world championship and accepted a voluntary provisional suspension under World Aquatics anti-doping rules.

The 25-year-old from Toronto stated in a since-deleted social media post her violation “does not involve any banned substance” and added, “I am and always have been a clean athlete.”

Under World Aquatics rules, if an athlete in the testing pool submits “late, inaccurate or incomplete whereabouts that lead to (them) being unavailable for testing, (they) may receive a Filing Failure.”

Canadian athletes receive training on how to navigate ADAMS and what information is required, said CCES Sport Integrity executive director Kevin Bean.

“What we do with each registered testing pool athlete is they’re required to do an online e-learning course, and they have a specific module that outlines how they work through the process to submit the whereabouts information, what ADAMS is, where it’s located, the type of information that you need to submit, what the deadlines are,” Bean said.

“They’re required to take that course upon entry and then it’s available to them every year thereafter if they remain in the registered testing pool, but it is no longer mandatory for them to take it in the years after.”

The deadline for submitting whereabouts info for each quarter is the last day of the month preceding that quarter. Athletes receive email reminders a month before and 15 days out from that deadline, Bean said.

There is flexibility to update ADAMS information after that quarterly deadline, Dunfee said.

“Doing that three months in advance doesn’t mean you can’t change it,” he said.

“We have a specific email address that we can send to, and a text message line that we send last-minute emergency changes to our whereabouts, too, if for whatever reason we can’t access the app, if there’s an issue with it.”

Fluid schedules in different time zones can cause whereabouts mistakes, Dunfee said.

“I had a case one time in Australia, where because of just getting my days confused, I missed the filing deadline for that quarter,” he recalled. “It sent a lot of things into chaos and it was some very panicked emails an hour after I was supposed to have done this, sorting it out. I managed to correct it and get it OK.”

Dunfee says he spends about an hour a month inputting his information in ADAMS because knows his schedule fairly well in advance.

He acknowledged keeping whereabouts information current is hectic for his more nomadic teammates.

“I completely understand for some athletes, it’s way more onerous than it is for me,” he said. “We have athletes who are hoping to get into these races in Europe.

“They might be on a start list for a race in Norway and a race in Belgium on the same weekend, and they’re just waiting to find out which one they get into. Certainly there are cases that are much more complicated than mine.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 21, 2025.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press