Electronic Sports League will test participants for doping
The organization of the Electronic Sports League will monitor the use of performance-enhancing drugs in e-sports tournaments. This may have been prompted by a professional gamer’s admission that he and his entire team were on Adderall during a tournament.
The Electronic Sports League, one of the world’s largest esports organizations, is announcing the news on its website. The decision may have been prompted by a confession by Cory “Semphis” Friesen, a professional CS:GO player, that he and his entire team, under the influence of the ADHD drug Adderall, participated in an ESL tournament in Poland. The prize money for the winning team amounted to 230,000 euros. “You know what, I don’t care. We were all on Adderall,” Friesen states in the video on July 12. Until recently, Friesen was part of the professional gaming team Cloud9.
Footage from the matches, including those in which Cloud9 is said to be under the influence of Adderall, is published by the ESL on YouTube. It is not the first time that participants of professional gaming tournaments have been involved in doping. Earlier this year, for example, Eurogamer wrote an extensive article about how widespread the use of drugs like Adderall is in esports circles. However, it is the first time that it has been bluntly and unabashedly admitted as such, which may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the ESL. Participating in a tournament under the influence of drugs or alcohol was already against the rules of the ESL, but those rules will now also be enforced.
The ESL is partnering with Nada, the National Anti-Doping Agentur, which is based in Germany, and Canada’s Wada, or the World Anti-Doping Agency. Together, the three parties will set up a policy to combat the use of doping in e-sports tournaments. The first doping tests will be conducted at the ESL One tournament in Cologne, to be held in August. The ESL will also draw up a list of the substances that will be banned, and will communicate to teams how it will be tested and what penalties there are for a violation. Cloud9’s players will not be penalized for their Adderall use because there is no real evidence of that and they can no longer be tested for it. That’s what the organization of the ESL tells Motherboard.