ATHENS, Jan 17: The World Anti-Doping Agency must change the way it tests athletes to avoid long legal battles and damage to reputations, according to the lawyer of controversial Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou.

“The system does not work because there are a lot of holes in they way it is applied,” their lawyer, Gregory Ioannidis, told Reuters in a telephone interview from England on Wednesday.

“This encourages a legal procedure that drags out and the losers are the athlete and the fans,” he said.

The sprinters missed three drugs tests, the last on the eve of the 2004 Athens Olympics, but struck a deal out of court with the governing International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) after accepting they had violated anti-doping rules.Kenteris, the 2000 Olympic 200 metres champion, and 100 metres silver-medallist Thanou were also temporarily suspended for two years until last month.

WADA chief Dick Pound, under pressure to soften the agency's uncompromising enforcement of anti-doping rules, said on Tuesday it could toughen penalties for users but introduce leniency for others with mitigating factors.

At present, WADA enforces strict liability rules whereby athletes are liable for any banned substances in their body or for failing to inform testers of a change of their whereabouts.

“The strict liability rules must be scrapped,” Ioannidis said. “They are arbitrary and capricious and that is why I support what Pound said.

“There are numerous cases where testers do not find an athlete on one day and they don't find him on the next days and then he is being given two missed tests.

“It is necessary to have an evaluation of missed tests. Why the athlete could not be present,” added Ioannidis, a law professor at the University of Buckingham in England.—Reuters