Performance Profiling—Perspectives for Anti-doping and beyond

Performance profiling is a new area of research that could potentially open new frontiers in the fight against doping. Even beyond exposing unnatural and pharmacology aided performances, there are other potential applications and benefits of performance modeling for the protection of the integrity of sports. The backbone of performance modeling in anti-doping is the individual tracking of performance through competition results or other metrics of sporting achievements. Since performance improvement is the primary goal of doping, it is expected that doping will affect competition results. Thus, individual tracking of performance could potentially expose suspicious cases that deserve more scrutiny from anti-doping officials and help to adjust targeted testing. On the other hand changes in performance levels could also be used to assess the efficiency of new anti-doping strategies. Another application of performance analysis is to develop unified classifications of athletes according to their level of performance. This classification has numerous practical meanings, but from anti-doping perspective it provides an opportunity to set exact criteria for athletes belonging to national and international testing pools and thus estimate the number of tests needed in different countries based on the number of athletes at ascertain performance level. At the moment, in the absence of unified and comprehensive criteria for national and international testing pools, there are no definitive regulations regarding exact doping test numbers needed. Thus, it creates inequality between nations and affects the credibility of the anti-doping system worldwide. Such classification would allow a more efficient use of anti-doping resources. Since doping is not the only threat to the integrity of sports, performance modeling can also help to reveal cases of other misbehavior in sports, like match fixing or result manipulation. In summary, performance modeling and its application to various fields is a new method to improve the efficiency of systems to safeguard the integrity of sports at different levels.