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March 28, 2026 — 9:30am
Earlier this week, the question of whether NRL players are cutting corners with weight-loss jabs was asked.
In response: Who would actually know?
Separately, in a news article published this week on the Betsy betting website, it was suggested that the Ozempic “craze” had jockeys in all corners of the country plunging the stuff into their veins.
In sports where weight, or the lack thereof, is imperative, you can see how Ozempic might be a valuable tool. For jockeys, imagine no more diets consisting entirely of triple espressos, iceberg lettuce and saunas.
Whether jockeys are allowed to inject themselves with Ozempic needle pens is questionable.
Rule AR136(h) prohibits the use of “anoretics”, or appetite suppressants. Wider than that, though, is a vexed question that has haunted the corridors of sport’s global anti-doping apparatus for more than two years now: Should semaglutide –the active ingredient in Ozempic, Wegovy, and the broader family of GLP-1 receptor agonist medications – be added to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Prohibited List?
When WADA listed semaglutide on its Monitoring Program in 2024, it was a tacit acknowledgement that sport can’t ignore this pharmaceutical phenomenon.
By the time the same topic was discussed at the 2025 World Conference on Doping in Sport, WADA’s
Health, Medical and Research Committee had commissioned targeted research into whether semaglutide has performance-enhancing effects, and hence whether an entirely new prohibited substance category – for weight-management substances – should be established.
The initial findings from that research remain under review; GLP-1 drugs remain permitted in sport for 2026. But the trajectory seems clear: WADA is analysing the matter with requisite seriousness.
The question of the prohibition of a substance turns on WADA’s well-established and notorious three-pronged test under the World Anti-Doping Code. A substance needs only satisfy two of three criteria to be added to the Prohibited List: (a) that it has the potential to enhance sport performance; (b) that it represents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete; and (c) that its use violates the esoteric spirit of sport.
It’s worth considering each criterion in turn, because the case is more delicately balanced than it appears.
Starting with the question of whether semaglutide has the potential to enhance sport performance, as of early 2026, there’s no published, peer-reviewed clinical trials directly measuring whether GLP-1 agonists improve athletic performance in trained, healthy athletes. That’s a significant missing link.
What exists instead is a body of indirect evidence and physiological reasoning that cuts both ways.
On one hand, the potential performance benefit is intuitive and, in certain sports, compelling. Semaglutide could possibly confer advantages in sports such as swimming and cycling through an improved power-to-weight ratio, or even motor racing, where a driver’s body weight has a correlative effect on speed and acceleration.
In WADA-controlled weight-sensitive and endurance sports, like cycling, rowing and triathlon, even a kilo of body fat shed without corresponding loss of power output can prove decisive.
There’s also emerging evidence of anti-inflammatory properties and improved blood sugar regulation, which can support recovery and metabolic efficiency during prolonged exertion.
However, the picture is far from unambiguously positive. Up to 40 per cent of weight loss attributable to the use of GLP-1 drugs is fat-free mass. That is, muscle and other lean tissue. That’s a substantially higher proportion of lean mass loss than is typically observed with diet-and-exercise weight loss alone.
For a power-dependent athlete, shedding muscle isn’t a shortcut; it’s potential self-sabotage.
Mix in the typical side effects of nausea, gastrointestinal distress, and an inability to execute in-race carbohydrate-loading strategies. Semaglutide may make an athlete lighter, but it may simultaneously make them less durable.
That ambiguity matters under the WADA Code, and greatly so. The standard is not that a substance must definitively enhance performance, but that it has the “potential” to do that. Given the plausible physiological mechanisms and the precedent of WADA banning other weight-loss agents, the performance criterion is probably satisfied.
The second criterion concerns health risk, and here the case is arguably stronger. GLP-1 drugs were developed for patients with Type 2 diabetes and clinical obesity.
In therapeutic settings with medical supervision, the medications have benefits including reduced cardiovascular risk. But the relevant question under the WADA Code is not whether the class of substances is safe for the general population; it’s whether it poses a health risk to athletes.
The answer, on available evidence, is that it clearly can pose such a risk. Athletes already operate at the margins of energy availability.
A substance that powerfully suppresses appetite and delays gastric emptying can shove a competitor into the realm of relative energy deficiency: a condition associated with hormonal disruption, impaired bone health, menstrual dysfunction, and compromised immunity. For female athletes, already disproportionately vulnerable to these conditions, the risks are particularly acute.
The potential health risks to athletes using semaglutide, without genuine medical need through obesity, are sufficient in isolation to satisfy the second criterion of the WADA Code.
The third criterion attaches to the idea of the “spirit of sport”, which is an abstruse concept. WADA’s Code defines the spirit of sport by reference to values including ethics, fair play, health, the celebration of the human spirit, character, and dedication.
While couched in deliberately broad terms, the vagueness exposes a place for criticism. But the measure, of whether something offends the essential, humanistic or ethical dimensions of sport, is designed to inoculate against unintended consequences of banning something because, for example, it enhances sport performance.
A super method of improving endurance is for an athlete to train at altitudes higher than birds might fly – but should that be banned because athletes in many countries live at sea level and have no mountains to climb? The case for semaglutide offending that spirit is more straightforward than it might seem.
The paradigm shift introduced by GLP-1 drugs is that weight control – hitherto something embedded in the discipline and sacrifice of athletic preparation and the exercising of manifest intestinal fortitude – can now be achieved pharmacologically, without anything like the same effort.
Turn back to the example of the jockey – nobody wants to live on caffeine and so much time in a steam room that your head better resembles a shrivelled prune. Who wouldn’t want a weekly injection to avoid all that?
An athlete who once had to manage their weight through meticulous attention to diet, training load, and nutritional periodisation can now achieve a comparable or superior result by injecting themselves once a week.
Whatever your views on the broader social merits of these medications, there’s something deeply incongruent about their use in a domain that purports to celebrate the unaided limits of human performance.
If we accept that diuretics are banned in part because they facilitate artificial weight manipulation (they’re also banned because of their ability to mask the presence of other also-banned substances), the logic for treating GLP-1 agonists differently requires some explaining.
The question isn’t really whether semaglutide and its successors will eventually find their way onto the Prohibited List. The question is when. And in weight-sensitive sports at least, the case for acting sooner rather than later is becoming difficult to resist.
