The World Anti-Doping Agency will discuss a potential rule to bar President Donald Trump from major international sporting events Tuesday – even if they take place on American soil.
The astonishing proposal is on the agenda for a WADA executive committee meeting in Baku. It is the latest and most extreme maneuver in a yearslong dispute over the US government’s refusal to pay its annual dues to the organization.
The US has held back a total of $7.3million over 2024 and 2025 in protest of WADA’s handling of a number of issues, including a case involving Chinese swimmers who were allowed to compete at the Paris Olympics despite testing positive for a banned substance.
WADA has been examining the proposal to bar government officials from countries that do not pay their dues since 2020 – around the time the threats from the US started getting louder. In 2024, the idea actually came to the executive committee.
Rahul Gupta – the drug czar during the Biden Administration who was every bit as critical of WADA as is his successor, Sara Carter – was on that panel back then and led the move to reject it. However, the US no longer has a representative on the committee.
WADA spokesman James Fitzgerald said the rule, if passed, would not bar Trump from this summer’s World Cup, the LA Olympics in 2028 or the Salt Lake City Games in 2032 because it would ‘not (be) applied retroactively.’
The World Anti-Doping Agency is set to discuss a potential rule to bar President Donald Trump from major international sporting events
The shock proposal to bar Trump will be heard just months before this summer’s World Cup
Yet the proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, does not include language to that effect.
The next meeting of the Foundation Board, which would make the ultimate decision, is not scheduled until November, four months after the World Cup final in New Jersey. The US, along with Canada and Mexico, is set to co-host this summer’s international soccer championship.
Even if it is passed, the rule to bar Trump and other government officials would be mostly symbolic, given the limits an international sports federation could have on the president of a country attending an event inside his own borders.
‘I have never heard of a $50-million-budget Swiss foundation being able to enforce a rule to, for example, prevent the United States president from going anywhere,’ Gupta said last week.
‘And the next question you have to ask is: How are you going to enforce it? Are they going to post a red notice from Interpol? It’s ludicrous. It’s clear they have not thought this through.’
The proposal calls for a three-tiered set of sanctions for countries that don’t pay dues. In the US case, that amounts to around $3.7m from last year, plus $3.6m it didn’t pay in 2024.
Among the most extreme sanctions include ‘government representatives being excluded from participation in major events such as World Championships and Olympic & Paralympic Games.’
That would include Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and members of Congress, who recently approved hundreds of millions in funding for security and other logistics for the World Cup and LA Games.
WADA, which came into existence in 1999, gets its funding equally from two places – governments of countries that participate in the Olympic movement and the International Olympic Committee. Representatives on WADA’s key decision-making bodies are generally divided equally between sports and government.
It could also have an effect on the 2028 Olympic Games, which will be held in Los Angeles
Trump, pictured at last year’s Club World Cup soccer final, has not commented on the proposal
Part of sending teams to major international events, such as the Olympics and the World Cup, requires everyone involved to pledge to follow WADA’s rules, whether they’re directly related to doping or to administrative issues, the likes of which the latest proposal covers.
Sports organizations – for instance the IOC and the governing bodies of individual sports – are considered ‘signatories’ to the WADA code.
Governments are tethered to WADA as part of an agreement they sign with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Like sports organizations, the UNESCO arrangement includes the governments agreeing to pay dues and follow its rules.
While Trump has not weighed in on this specifically, Carter, his drug czar, said the US government ‘will continue to stand firm in our demand for accountability and transparency from WADA to ensure fair competition in sport.’
This squabble has been festering since the first Trump administration, rooted in America’s distrust of the global anti-doping system, which came under international scrutiny first for its handling of a Russian doping scandal dating to before the Sochi Games in Russia in 2014.
Then, in 2024, news came of 23 Chinese swimmers – some of them on the team that went to the Paris Olympics – who were allowed to compete despite testing positive. WADA accepted the Chinese doping regulator’s theory that the athletes had been contaminated by traces of banned heart medication in a hotel kitchen.
The ONDCP and Congress under both the Trump and Biden administrations have withheld the payments to WADA.
