Until the end of 2020, doping was a sports-governance matter in the United States, handled by federations and anti-doping bodies under the World Anti-Doping Code. The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act changed the category. Signed on 4 December 2020 as Public Law 116-206 and codified at 21 U.S.C. §2402, it made participation in a scheme to use prohibited substances or methods at a major international competition a federal criminal offence.
The penalties
- Up to ten years of imprisonment.
- Fines of up to USD 250,000 for an individual and up to USD 1,000,000 for a non-individual defendant.
- Restitution to victims, and forfeiture of property involved in the offence.
Who is the target, and who is not
The offence is aimed at the people who organise and supply, not at the athlete who tests positive. The statute reaches those who knowingly carry out, or conspire to carry out, a scheme to influence a major international competition by use of a prohibited substance or method — coaches, doctors, officials, suppliers, administrators. The athlete who is doped is treated as a victim rather than as a defendant for the purposes of restitution.
Why a US statute reaches a competition held elsewhere
Because the definition of a covered competition is drawn through American connections. A competition qualifies where it involves athletes from the United States, or where a United States sponsor or broadcaster is involved. That is the jurisdictional hook: not where the race was run, but whose athletes, money and broadcast rights were in it. Several governing bodies objected publicly to the extraterritorial reach while the bill was moving.
The relationship with the sports system
A criminal case under the Act and a sports case under the Code are separate proceedings with separate standards of proof, and one does not wait for the other. An athlete can be ineligible under the Code while nobody is prosecuted, and a supplier can be prosecuted without any athlete being sanctioned. The difference between the two kinds of consequence is the subject of Provisional suspension is not ineligibility. The sports-side rules the criminal statute sits beside are rewritten from 1 January 2027, as set out in the entry on the 2027 Code.
What came with it
The Act also protects whistleblowers who report doping fraud. That provision is why the law carries the name it does: the testimony that exposed the Russian state programme came from the former head of the Moscow laboratory, and a statute without protection for the next such witness would have been a statute without informants.
Where this is written: Public Law 116-206, codified at 21 U.S.C. §2402, law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/2402; legislative history at congress.gov.