Tue, August 26, 2025
UKAD employs an all-female team of Doping Control Personnel for the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025
UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) has employed an all-female team of Doping Control Personnel for World Rugby to assist with delivering a “clean and fair” Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 which commenced on 22 August with England v USA. Doping Control Personnel collect samples from players. The tournament also features the largest cohort of female coaches in the event’s history.
Chief Executive of UKAD, Jane Rumble, expressed: “It is wonderful to see the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 on England turf in stadiums across the country. We are delighted to be delivering the testing programme at this prestigious international event. The public needs and wants to know that the players we admire and support are competing clean – 100% authentic, playing with integrity and pride. We wish all the teams well for a fair and well-fought tournament…
It is also fitting that our team of testing Doping Control Personnel working for the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 are all women. Our colleagues and partners will be out and about on a collective mission to protect, inform, educate and empower the clean player.”
UKAD will be working alongside the Drug Control Centre (DCC) at King's College London to deliver this project.
Head of the DCC and Director of King’s Forensics, Professor Kim Wolff, will oversee the DCC’s analysis of player samples throughout the tournament. The DCC lab is the only World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accredited lab in the UK.
Director of Anti-Doping and Game Equipment at World Rugby, Mike Earl, stated: “The testing programme is the most extensive ever delivered at a women’s World Cup…
Keep Rugby Clean weekend [6-7 September 2025] is the perfect opportunity for everyone involved in elite rugby to show how much playing clean matters to our sport.”
The Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 also features the largest ever cohort of female coaches in the event’s history. 32% of the coaches are female, up from 15% in 2021. For the first time in Women’s Rugby World Cup history, three female head coaches will take the helm of national teams: France, Australia, and Japan. This compares with one (Japan) in 2021.
Of the 281 staff across the management teams for all 16 unions, 40% are women. This stands out in the wider sporting landscape. At the Paris 2024 Games, women represented roughly only 13% of all coaches.
Organisers have announced that the tournament’s final on September 27 will be the most attended women’s rugby match in history, with 82,000 attendees expected in Twickenham. In comparison, there were 66,000 women’s rugby spectators at a single match during the 2024 Paris Games.
England are favourites, having won 57 of their last 58 games. They conquered the USA 69-7 in their first match of the World Cup tournament.
Additional news includes the fact that the tournament has also introduced flashing mouthguards for its players which flash red to signal potentially concussive impacts.
UKAD’s official statement can be found here.
