Your role in clean sport

As whānau, you have a key role in helping rangatahi develop the values and principles that are essential to a culture of clean sport. Your influence also changes they way they think about threatening behaviours like using supplements. When your child is young and just starting off in sport, doping is unlikely to be a major concern. But you can reinforce the values of clean sport, for example:

• a healthy respect for the rules
• healthy nutrition
• training and recovery as a means to enhancing performance
• playing fairly
• the importance of a 'mastery' approach, which reinforces skill development and improvement over winning
• recognising the value of hard work and determination over cheating

To find out more, download the Parent guide to support clean sport (PDF).

As your child continues to develop in sport, and especially as they begin to compete at a higher level, they are more likely to be tested as part of our anti-doping programme. It’s at this stage that you should take the time to speak to your child about doping and what it means to be a clean competitor. It’s also important to know that you may be asked to be a representative for your athlete in the testing process.

Read more about the testing of minors.

• Read Keeping your child's sport clean: Tips for parents and whānau
• Know the NZ Sports Anti-Doping Rules
• Check medications and methods
• Navigate supplements
• See our clean sport e-learning

Coaches and athlete support personnel have a significant and influential role in supporting clean sport. Research has shown that the majority of athletes will seek information about anti-doping matters from a coach or support person before any other source. As someone athletes will rely on, you need to have a good understanding of anti-doping and your responsibilities.

The quickest and easiest way to build your knowledge around clean sport is throughour support staff-specific e-learning course or a face-to-face webinar. Explore our education options via the link below.

Explore clean sport education.

As important influences on athletes beliefs and decisions, it is helpful to stand up for clean sport in your day-to-day life and intereactions with athletes of all ages.

You could do this by:

• Create a sporting environment that champions fair play and clean sport over unfair and unethical behaviour
• Support athletes in times of stress and be mindful of putting unrealistic pressure on them
• Remind athletes to check all medications and methods before use
• Offer to be a support person or representative for your athlete if requested

We provide free clean sport resources to help you promote clean sport.

Request clean sport resources.

We encourage you to:

• Read the Sports Anti-Doping Rules
• Understand the threat posed by supplements
• Get familiar with the doping control process
• Understand Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs)
• Learn how to report suspected doping

We want to help NSOs protect athletes. The most important way we can do this is to work closely with you to ensure that your athletes are well-informed. Historically, in New Zealand, well over half of our doping offences are inadvertent; clean sport education helps lower the chance that athletes will use a prohibited drug or supplement in ignorance.

At heart we all have the same aims: to keep our athletes and sports clean, so that athletes have the opportunity to achieve and exceed their potential in a way in which they - and we all - can take pride.

You can download the following resources to help keep you on track in your support of clean sport. The NSO Checklist outlines the key things NSOs can do to help support clean sport, while the NSO Crisis Guide uses a realistic case study to highlight best practice for NSOs dealing with a high-profile positive test.

Download resources

• Download the NSO Clean Sport Checklist (PDF)
• Download the NSO Crisis Guide (PDF)

Each year DFSNZ updates and publishes the Sports Anti-Doping Rules (SADR), to reflect changes made to the Anti-Doping Code or to address New Zealand-specific issues that have arisen over the previous year.

More than 70 sports in New Zealand have signed up to the Sports Anti-Doping Rules, embedding a commitment to clean sport into the culture of their organsiations. If you adopt the SADR properly at the outset, this will include provision for future amendments and will not, in the normal course of events, require any further action by you. Some NSOs may be able to adopt them by way of a resolution of their executive members, while other NSOs may require a resolution of an annual general meeting.

Those bound to the SADR include your members and individuals who participate in events run under your Rules, as well as support personnel. We offer customised education to fit an organisation's needs - to help both NSO staff and athletes understand their anti-doping obligations and to ensure that there are nodangerous gaps in knowledge.

For advice on how to adopt the rules for your sport, please contact us.

Your athletes at all levels should be aware of what they need to do to comply with the Rules and to understand that doping presents a significant risk to their health, their reputation and their career.

We are committed to educating athletes from all codes so that they cultivate a strong set of sporting values and they know how to compete clean. Education is essential to the prevention of doping, because it provides athletes with the knowledge and values to compete cleanly in sport. It also helps them to understand the Rules, so they don’t break them by accident.

We are particularly eager to work with aspiring athletes from a young age to support them in developing a sporting attitude that supports clean sporting behaviours.

We are also able to educate atheltes' wider support network: coaches, medical professionals, managers and parents. These personnel play an important role in helping to create a culture of clean sport and assisting athletes to comply with the rules.

We strongly recommend that all of your athletes and support personnel attend one of our clean sport workshops or complete our e-learning annually.

Explore our education options.

We rely on working with you to promote clean sport at all levels of competition. Sharing clean sport content across your channels is an easy and helpful way to reinforce clean sport messaging.

We can support you with generic content for your website or social media feeds, keep you updated with important promotions, services and updates and even work with you and your athletes on tailored editorial or advice content. You can also follow us on social media and share the content we post.

To request our generic web content or to find out what we can do to support your content and communications, please contact us.

If your national sport organisation is bidding for or has won the rights to host an international event in New Zealand, it is likely that under the international federation’s rules, testing (or doping control) will be required at the event.

If you are in the bidding process, we encourage you to talk to us prior to submitting your bid. We can provide advice on the type of testing required including a cost estimate for your budget. Costs will depend on the number and type of testing that’s required and could be a significant budget expense.

For more information, please contact us.

You may also wish to explore our User Pays Testing.

Many common medications contain ingredients that are prohibited in sport, so when prescribing or administering medicines to an athlete, it's important that you're aware what is safe and what could put the athlete at risk of receiving a ban from sport.

Here are some useful actions:

• Read about medications and methods
• Check medications and methods on Global DRO
• Check the WADA Prohibited List