Paris (AFP)

The French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD) on Wednesday warned high-level athletes, like Kevin Mayer, to publish their biological data to show that they are above suspicion. according to her "ineffective" and that "poses an ethical problem".

The world record holder for the decathlon announced last week, as Olympic record vice champion Mélina Robert-Michon and seven other French athletes, that he joined the Quartz project, a private health monitoring program, already widespread. in the ultra-trail, and which allows including volunteer athletes to disclose their biological data, including blood data.

In the wake, the French Athletics Federation (FFA), embarrassed by the case of Clemence Calvin, under a temporary suspension for a refusal of control in Morocco, announced that it would encourage its athletes to s' engage in the Quartz program, managed by the association "Athletes for transparency" by Pierre Sallet.

In France, all federations are already supposed to organize the medical follow-up of their top athletes, a legal obligation.

But in a message to athletes sent Wednesday to the federations and on its website, the AFLD has several reservations. The anti-doping authority stresses in particular that a health monitoring program can not "issue certificates of probity +, especially if the analyzes are done on convocation, not unexpected, and in the laboratory of medical biology of the choice of the athlete" .

It also warns against the interpretation of the results: "apparently abnormal profiles find, after examination or investigation, other explanations than doping, including genetic particularities, pathologies or a state of pregnancy". "As for the absence of anomaly, it does not prove that the athlete does not take drugs, as has been shown in many cases: one can have a normal profile and yet be tested positive," adds the AFLD.

The agency finally reaffirms "the right of people to preserve their privacy and their right to medical confidentiality, without being stigmatized and accused of wanting to + hide something". "No sportsman should be pressured to reveal his biological analyzes, nor be blamed for having chosen to exercise a fundamental right," she says, without condemning the approach of Mayer.

? 2019 AFP