JABBFA to ramp up anti-doping fight
Published:Monday | November 25, 2019 | 12:13 AMDaniel Wheeler/Gleaner Writer
Jamaica Amateur Body Building and Fitness Association (JABBFA) assistant treasurer Matthew Smith-Barrett believes that the organisation can do its part to fight doping in the sport.
Smith-Barrett was speaking at the launch of the fifth Stamina Workshop at the Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA) headquarters in St Andrew on Thursday. The three-day training seminar, to be held from Wednesday to Friday, is a partnership among the JABBFA, the JOA, and the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) called JOA Stamina.
The training, under the topic Kinesiology in Weight Training Exercises, will include an anti-doping component in relation to the sport of bodybuilding that, according to Smith-Barrett, will help ensure transparency. “What we are trying to emphasise is to dispel the stigma that has been associated with our sport for many years,” he told The Gleaner.
OPEN FOR ALL
IFBB Antidoping Commission chairman and lecturer Professor Mauricio de Arruda Campos will be administering the seminars, which are open for all athletes and sporting professionals. Campos has been a doping control officer at the Olympic and Pan American games since Sydney 2000, and Smith-Barrett says he is the perfect person to administer the course.
“We want to emphasise locally that we are partners with the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission (JADCO) and we are complicit and compliant with JADCO and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA),” he said. “That’s why we find it very important, not only from an aesthetic perspective but also from an anti-doping perspective, to have the chairman of the IFBB Antidoping Commission to be the one to do this training.”
The JOA made the JABBFA an addition to its member associations last year, and Smith-Barrett hopes that the courses will give bodybuilders the chance to have international careers.
“Through the partnership with the JOA, we decided to bring back our training sessions and to bring in our international partners,” Smith-Barrett said. “We don’t want our athletes to remain local. We want them to [have] professional careers internationally and to show that there are other sports you can earn a living from for all of our athletes.”
The sessions will feature a theoretical component, as well as practical sessions, at Fit Farm Fitness Club in St Andrew.