Should Georgia be forced into the Repechage playoff for fielding a player using PEDs?

Whilst talk of performance enhancing drugs in sports measured by times or distances like athletics, cycling, or swimming is abundant. Sports like rugby, football, tennis etc largely escape carrying anything close to the same reputation.

Pro rugby player/bodybuilder Chris Cloete  

Some part of this is likely testing in individual sports is significantly easier where you just need to focus on the top few dozen athletes. Than testing in a team sports league with thousands of athletes. The other is questions of doping will always very obviously pop out after a freakishly fast time in athletics (Flo Jo's record for instance), but less so after a huge performance in other sports that may have been similarly enhanced.

But there is reason to think the way a sport like athletics is singled out for a bad reputation above other sports may be a bit unfair. As whilst it certainly has obviously long been prevalent in the sport (57% admitted doping in an anonymous survey in 2011), they do test harder and have caught a higher number of high profile names in the past compared to other sports.

In rugby this a sorely under talked about topic. The modern professional players frequently have training regimes that contain a large amounts of bodybuilding (an activity known to mix with a culture of widespread steroid abuse) with players especially youngsters often told to "get bigger". They also stand a reasonably good chance of only occasionally being tested. And like most sports there is the issue of a backwards incentive structure of rugby needing to pay big money to better police and expose negative press about itself which leads to relatively meagre anti-doping efforts.

IRFU drug tested their pro players only 107 times
in 2017/18 (far fewer tests than they have pro players)

In 2017/2018 the RFU made 739 tests across the Premiership, Championship, and women's Premier 15s. That's well under even one test per player in a season. In the same season IRFU made only 107 tests of its professional c.200 men's players. Last May after a Top 14 barrage match Kane Douglas on an episode Le French Rugby Podcast said he was tested for the first time in his four years in France.

Keep in mind testing is actually ineffectivefor catching cheats (although still very much worth doing for keeping doping in check by forcing cheats to be at least a bit careful). Nick Harris of Sporting Intelligence estimates it catches maybe 1 in 20. We know for a fact from anonymous surveys plenty of athletes do not get caught. Or a huge doper like Lance Armstrong can go his entire career passing every test. More often big names are more likely to be caught from a journalistic investigation and whistle blowers than testing. Indeed pro rugby's level of testing is largely almost useless for catching a sophisticated cheating regime. Unsurprisingly considering this very few big name professional players have been busted in the last 10 years (something which WR anti-doping general manager Mike Earl rather complacently uses to claim that "it confirms that there isn’t a serious doping issue at the top level of the game").

But at slightly lower level over the last 12 months we have actually seen 7 active international 15s players get banned for PEDs. All of them from "Tier 2" nations and also all players based in "Tier 2" nations.

The banned players are: Russia's first choice hooker Stanislav Selskii (3 years), Colombia and Cafeteros hooker Juan David Herrera (3 years), Colombia women's prop Luxora Suarez (2 years), Namibia prop Gerhard Opperman (3 years), Zimbabwe fly half Dudlee White-Sharpley (3 years), Georgia lock Davit Gigauri (4 years), USA back row Riekert Hattingh (very generously only 6 months).

Indeed this a theme. Look at the list of players caught in WR competition and it's overwhelmingly players from outside any of the major "Tier 1" nations. Why do these players get caught more?

It's most likely for same reason amateur cyclists apparently now get caught more than pros. Their doping is likely less sophisticated or smart enough to escape the very basic testing in place (indeed the players maybe even got surprised by the presence of testing at a lower profile international). It seems implausible though that nearly all the PED users in international rugby are its lower profile players.

Should Georgia have been deducted points for fielding
Davit Gigauri who was later banned for using PEDs?

But all this also raises another question. Why when we have seen sides harshly punished for fielding an ineligible player, is there almost no consequence for a team fielding what is essentially an ineligible player using PEDs?

Davit Gigauri played in four of the ten matches Georgia's RWC qualifying campaign. It is true Georgia may not have intended to cheat, but neither did Spain with Van den Berg. Also true they would have certainly qualified without him, but so would have Spain without Van den Berg.

If you deduct 5 points from each match Gigauri played, then Georgia would now being forced to play the Repechage this November against USA (although this would put them in the exact same group anyway).

On the one hand it would seem harsh as Gigauri is surely far from the only player to have used PEDs among sides qualified for the World Cup. But on the otherhand there surely is a case for the team gaining an advantage (knowingly or not) from a player using PEDs to be penalised more than they currently are.