In reply to Offwidth:
It is good to see this but its a shame they didn't dig a little deeper. The IFSC came out with a pretty good new policy in February. Not perfect and delegated too much back to National Federations but they did it in such a way that the Federations were basically forced to do the right thing. So a solid 7/10 in my view.
But then they implemented it in such a way as to make it completely worthless! They basically immediately broke their own policy by issuing athlete licences (which you need to do IFSC competitions) before receiving any medical assessments from the federations. The policy said that licences would only be issued after federations had done a risk assessment for each athlete and got additional medical tests when needed. But this part of the policy was immediately broken removing any driver in 2024 for Federations to actually do what was in the policy.
They are supposed to be doing random checks during the season. But the metrics for these random checks which would lead them to do anything are substantially lower than the values for federation checks. To give an example - as a female athlete you'd need a BMI of about 16 on the random check for the IFSC to do anything! So a pretty pointless sytem.
So the IFSC gets the kudos for bringing in what is, on paper, a good policy. But then avoids any difficult conversations and in the words of Janja "looks away" by not actually following it. And the fact that there has been nothing written about this shows how the federations and IFSC are colluding in finding ways to avoid engaging with what is a difficult but very important subject. Pretty unimpressive
