GLP-1 and Doping: WADA Status of Semaglutide and Tirzepatide

Semaglutide and tirzepatide are not prohibited in sport. Neither appears anywhere in the 2026 WADA Prohibited List, which came into force on 1 January 2026, so no Therapeutic Use Exemption is required to take either one and competing while on them is not an anti-doping rule violation. Both sit on a different document, the Monitoring Program, which collects data and carries no sanction. That is the answer to the question almost everybody is asking, and it is only half the picture. The GLP-1 drugs that have no regulatory approval anywhere, retatrutide and survodutide among them, fall under category S0 and are prohibited at all times, in and out of competition. An athlete who buys one of those from a peptide vendor has committed a doping offence even though the person injecting approved semaglutide next to them has not.

Are semaglutide and tirzepatide banned in sport?

No. The 2026 Prohibited List runs to 26 pages and the words semaglutide, tirzepatide, GLP-1 and glucagon do not appear on any of them. There is no category the approved GLP-1 receptor agonists belong to, so there is nothing to declare, nothing to apply for and no in-competition window to observe.

This holds across the sports that follow the World Anti-Doping Code, which is most of them: World Triathlon, World Athletics, the UCI, and the national federations that sign up to the Code. A federation can write stricter rules of its own, and a few weight-class and physique sports have their own policies, so check your own governing body rather than assuming. The Code sets the floor, not the ceiling.

The practical consequence is that an age-group athlete on a prescription from their doctor is racing legally. So is a professional. The medication being fashionable, or being resented, does not change its regulatory status.

What the Monitoring Program actually does

WADA keeps a second list alongside the Prohibited List. The Monitoring Program names substances that are legal but that WADA wants usage data on, and laboratories report anonymised detection patterns rather than reporting athletes. A finding produces a number in a dataset, not a case.

Semaglutide went onto that program in 2024. From 1 January 2026 the monitoring was widened: markers of semaglutide and additionally of tirzepatide are now observed both in-competition and out-of-competition. Monitoring the marker rather than the parent compound is a lab-method choice and it does not change anything for the athlete.

People read the Monitoring Program as a warning shot, and in a sense it is, because substances sometimes move from it to the Prohibited List after a few years of data. It is equally often the route by which a substance is cleared and dropped. Being monitored is not being on probation, and it confers no obligation on you at all.

The unapproved GLP-1s are prohibited at all times

Category S0 catches anything that no government health regulator anywhere has approved for human therapeutic use. The 2026 List defines it as any pharmacological substance not addressed by a later section of the List and with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority for human therapeutic use, giving drugs in pre-clinical or clinical development, discontinued drugs, designer drugs and veterinary-only substances as its examples.

That sentence covers most of the peptide market. Retatrutide has completed phase 3 trials and has no approval anywhere. Survodutide is in development. Both are sold today by vendors who label them for research use, and both are S0 substances, prohibited in competition and out of it, with no seasonal window in which taking them is allowed.

The gap between the two situations is wide and almost nobody explains it. Approved semaglutide carries no anti-doping consequence whatsoever. An unapproved triple agonist carries the same category of consequence as a designer steroid. They are frequently discussed in the same sentence as though the regulatory question were the same one.

Grey-market semaglutide and strict liability

There is a middle case that catches people out. Semaglutide the molecule is approved, so semaglutide from an unofficial source is still not an S0 substance. The problem is that you cannot show what was in the vial.

Anti-doping runs on strict liability, which means the athlete is responsible for whatever is found in their sample regardless of how it got there or whether they intended it. The FDA has documented compounded GLP-1 products containing salt forms that are not equivalent to the approved active ingredient, which is direct evidence that non-standard supply chains do ship mislabelled actives. If a vial sold as semaglutide contains something else, the something else is your responsibility.

A prescription from a doctor, dispensed by a pharmacy, removes this risk almost entirely. It is the single cheapest anti-doping precaution available to anyone in this position, and it costs nothing beyond going through the proper channel.

Do you need a Therapeutic Use Exemption?

No, and you cannot get one. A TUE authorises the use of a prohibited substance for a documented medical need. Semaglutide and tirzepatide are not prohibited, so there is no prohibition to be exempted from and an application would be refused as unnecessary.

If WADA were ever to move the class onto the Prohibited List, that calculus would invert overnight and a large number of people with genuine obesity or type 2 diabetes indications would need TUEs at once. The administrative weight of that is one of the arguments raised against prohibition, and it is a practical objection rather than an ethical one.

What is worth doing now is keeping records. Prescription, prescriber, dates, doses. If the rules change, the athletes who can show a documented treatment history from before the change will have a far easier time than those reconstructing it afterwards.

Does a GLP-1 actually improve performance?

This is the part where the honest answer is that nobody knows. The trials that established what these drugs do were run in people with obesity or type 2 diabetes, which is who they were developed for. Athletes were not a population anyone studied, so the performance question has no direct evidence behind it in either direction.

What is not in dispute is that losing weight helps in sports where you carry your own body mass, and that a GLP-1 causes weight loss. The open question is whether that indirect route counts as performance enhancement in the sense anti-doping means, given that fasting, altitude tents and ordinary caloric restriction all produce advantages and none of them are banned. Roughly a quarter to two-fifths of GLP-1 weight loss is lean tissue when nobody trains, which cuts against the assumption that the drug is straightforwardly ergogenic for an athlete.

A survey of 114 sports physicians across 38 countries and 93 sports, published in Sports Medicine in August 2026, is the closest thing to a picture of what is happening on the ground. Twelve per cent of them were aware of athletes using GLP-1 drugs without a medical need, most often to make a weight limit or to lose weight gained during injury. Forty-four per cent supported prohibiting the drugs eventually and thirty-eight per cent were undecided, which is a profession that has not made up its mind.

What would have to change for these drugs to be banned

WADA revises the Prohibited List annually. A substance is added when the agency judges that it meets two of three criteria: potential to enhance performance, actual or potential health risk, and contravention of the spirit of sport. The first of those is precisely what the evidence does not currently settle for this drug class.

So the realistic sequence is that monitoring continues, someone runs a study in trained athletes, and the decision follows the result. You will see dates circulating for when this supposedly happens. Treat them as forecasts about WADA's revision cycle, because no published WADA document commits to a date and no decision has been announced.

If you compete, the useful habit is to check the List yourself each January rather than relying on last season's understanding or on a forum. It is one document, it is published months in advance, and it is the only source that settles the question.

The evidence, one row per claim

Questions people ask

Sources

1. WADA Prohibited List 2026
2. NADA Germany, WADA publishes Prohibited List 2026
3. USADA, key changes on the 2024 Prohibited List
4. openFDA drugs@FDA, zero results for retatrutide
5. Read et al., Sports Medicine, cross-sectional survey of sport physicians on GLP-1 use in sport
6. Loughborough University press release, 18 August 2026
7. FDA, bulk drug substances used in compounding under section 503A
8. openFDA drugs@FDA, zero results for survodutide

Keep reading

• GLP-1 and Working Out: Strength Training, Muscle Loss and ProteinLean mass loss is real and measured. The trials that measured it mostly had nobody lifting, so treat those num
• GLP-1 and Running: Endurance Training, Pace and FuellingBody mass falls, which helps. Glycogen availability falls and resting heart rate rises, which hurts. Aerobic f
• Retatrutide: Triple Agonist Phase 3 Results and Current StatusThe strongest weight-loss numbers in obesity medicine, attached to a drug you cannot legally obtain.
• Survodutide: GLP-1/Glucagon Dual Agonist and the Liver-Fat AngleMid-pack on weight, distinctive on liver fat. Also a lesson in why a smaller headline percentage does not mean
• Research-Chemical Peptides: 5-Amino-1MQ and the Grey MarketThe consumer-protection page, built around the cleanest example of a compound with everything except human evi
• GLP-1 and Endurance Event FuellingEndurance fuelling depends on the one thing this drug class slows. The conflict is real, the label documents t