Golf Surpasses More Athletic Pastimes In Positive Test Results

As Wednesday kicks off the one-year countdown to the Rio Olympic Games, it is interesting that in all of the stories on WADA's findings into sports with issues, that golf registered the third highest score for the percentage of positive drug tests.

Johnny Waterson of the Irish Times explains.

An AAF identifies the presence of a prohibited substance or its metabolites or markers in any given sample.

The 2015 figures, which collates all of the samples analysed and reported by accredited Wada laboratories throughout the world in 2014, shows that golf scored a 1.6 per cent rate of positive drugs tests compared to 1.0 per cent for both athletics and cycling and 0.8 per cent for rugby.

More embarrassing for the sport is that golf came in with the third highest score for the percentage of positive tests.

It was worse than all of the other 21 listed sports except for equestrian sport and weightlifting.

There was good news though, the sample size was small and anabolic steroids were not an issue.

Of those 144 were positive which gave the 0.5 per cent positive reading. Athletics provided 25,830 samples and cycling 22,471 samples and both came out with the same reading of 1.0 per cent positive.

In athletics, cycling, soccer and rugby the most abused banned substances were anabolic agents, while in golf the samples returned no blood or urine that tested positive for those agents.

The drugs of choice for golfers are diuretics and other masking agents as well as Glucocortico-steroids.