‘Whereabouts failure’: Why did Penny Oleksiak receive a two-year swim ban?

John Vennavally-Rao has more on the International Testing Agency's decision to ban Canadian swimmer Penny Oleksiak from competition for two years.

Swimmer Penny Oleksiak, one of Canada’s most well-known Olympians, was suspended from competition for two years earlier this week for violating an anti-doping rule, but the case has nothing to do with any banned substances.

Oleksiak accepted the ban after she was found to have committed three “whereabouts failures” within a 12-month period, according to the International Testing Agency (ITA), an organization that manages anti-doping programs for international sports federations.

Here’s a closer look at what constitutes a whereabouts failure and why high-level athletes have to follow such stringent rules about their location year-round.

What is the whereabouts program?

A select group of elite athletes are required to take part in the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) whereabouts program, which aims to ensure that those at higher risk of taking performance enhancing drugs or banned substances can be tested randomly at any time.

Athletes like Oleksiak, who is Canada’s most decorated female Olympian, must on a quarterly basis submit general information to WADA about where they are going to be over the next three-month period.

All athletes in the program must also identify one hour each day where they will be in a specific location of their choosing so that drug testers can locate them to conduct a random test.

What is a whereabouts failure?

A whereabouts failure is any combination of three missed tests or filing violations within a 12-month period, as defined by the World Anti-Doping Code.

Of course, it’s impossible for athletes to know exactly where they will be on a specific day months in advance, but location information can be updated at any time.

A filing violation would include not updating their location if travel plans change. For instance, if an athlete said they were going to be training near their residence in Canada during a given week, but they were instead taking part in a competition oversees, that would be a filing violation.

And if an athlete is not in the identified location where they guaranteed they would be for one hour on any given day, that is considered a missed test.

‘It’s pretty stringent’

In a press release on Tuesday, the ITA said Oleksiak committed three whereabout failures between October 2024 and June of this year. It did not specify whether the failures were filing violations, missed tests or a combination of both.

The whereabouts program may seem cumbersome, but it’s a way to ensure people can trust in the fairness of international competitions, Swim Ontario CEO Dean Boles told CP24 on Tuesday.

“It’s pretty stringent,” he said, “not many people can live by this type of routine but its one way of maintaining the integrity of clean sport.”

With files from The Canadian Press