The Need for Project EPCS-TE

The Anti-Doping Education Guidelines in Tertiary Education Institutions that were adopted by the Council of Europe’s Monitoring Group of the Anti-Doping Convention in 2016, emphasised the important role of tertiary education institutions in combatting doping and promoting anti-doping education across levels of sport, and across athlete groups (e.g., demographic, socio-economic ethnic, and ethnic groups). In particular, the Recommendation of the Monitoring Group on Anti-Doping Education Guidelines for Tertiary Education Institutions recognised that “tertiary education institutions have a responsibility to provide high quality training to the new specialists in the field of sport, therefore have a crucial role to focus on the knowledge, understanding, skills, behaviour and attitudes regarding anti-doping” (Rec 2011, 1), and that “the proper implementation of the Anti-Doping Education Guidelines for Tertiary Education Institutions will contribute to influencing the careers of both young talents and high performance/elite level athletes towards clean sport behaviour” (Rec 2016, 2). Similarly, the Implementation Guidelines of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s International Standard for Education (WADA, 2021) specifically refer to the importance of developing synergies between NADOs and tertiary education institutions (e.g., universities) to enable knowledge transfer and support research, implementation, and evaluation of anti-doping education programmes.