The Australian Football League will become the first sporting code in Australia to test for human growth hormones and a new type of the drug EPO under a new deal announced with the Australian Sport Anti-Doping Authority.
The AFL operations manager Adrian Anderson says the league will also conduct extensive blood testing and profiling, and freeze samples for a period of up to eight years.
Anderson says the new measures are being taken to ensure the integrity of the sport, and the freezing of samples for future testing will give the league the ability to retrospectively penalise players.
He says the AFL could use that power to strip players of individual awards or even to strip a club of a premiership if they are later found to have been using banned substances at the time.
