The dark web is a bazaar for performance-enhancing drugs but is not a market place currently frequented by elite athletes, concluded the World Anti-Doping Agency on Friday following a nearly year-long investigation.
The Project Team did identify a group of dark web suppliers who specifically referenced elite athletes as clientele and a supposed ability to evade anti-doping detection. "I am relieved it does not have the attraction that we were assuming at the beginning," Gunter Younger, WADA's Intelligence and Investigations director told Reuters.
Investigators found that the vast majority of those wading into the murky waters of the dark web in search of PEDs were mostly body builders and amateur athletes with the bulk of products coming from illicit pharmaceutical laboratories and homebrewers primarily in Asia.