The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) will not add GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) or tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) to its 2027 Prohibited List, the organization confirmed following an Executive Committee meeting in Belgrade, Serbia on September 10, 2026. The 2027 list takes effect January 1, 2027. Instead, WADA is placing these drugs on its Monitoring Programme, a lower-tier watchlist that tracks usage patterns through existing anti-doping tests without triggering sanctions for athletes who use them.
Why WADA Didn't Ban Them
Under WADA's own rules, a substance can only be added to the Prohibited List if it meets at least two of three criteria: it enhances performance, it poses a health risk to athletes, or its use violates the "spirit of sport." According to reporting on the decision, WADA's review concluded the current evidence doesn't clearly establish GLP-1 drugs as performance-enhancing in the way anabolic steroids or stimulants are, since their primary documented effects are on appetite, blood sugar, and body weight rather than strength, speed, or endurance directly.
Professor Olivier Rabin, WADA's senior director for science and medicine, was reported cautioning that athletes should be "very careful using those drugs" without medical supervision, signaling the agency takes the safety question seriously even while declining to prohibit the class outright.
Monitoring vs. Prohibition: What's the Difference
Placement on WADA's Monitoring Programme is materially different from prohibition. Athletes can use monitored substances without violating anti-doping rules, and no therapeutic use exemption is required. What changes is that anti-doping laboratories will track how frequently these drugs show up in samples collected for other testing purposes, building a usage-pattern dataset WADA can use to revisit the question in future years. It's the same mechanism WADA has historically used before eventually prohibiting other substance classes, though monitoring doesn't guarantee a future ban will follow.
Why This Is Being Debated at All
The appeal of a GLP-1 drug to some athletes, particularly in sports with a high power-to-weight ratio like cycling or distance running, is straightforward: rapid, medically supervised weight loss can improve performance metrics indirectly by changing that ratio, separate from any direct effect on muscle strength or aerobic capacity. A 2026 survey out of Loughborough University found that 12% of sports medicine physicians surveyed were aware of athletes using GLP-1 drugs without a medical indication like diabetes or diagnosed obesity, and 44% of those physicians supported eventual prohibition in competitive sport.
What This Means in Practice
For now, an athlete taking a prescribed GLP-1 medication for an approved indication faces no anti-doping restriction. The unresolved question WADA is monitoring is a narrower one: off-label use by athletes without a medical need, specifically to influence competitive weight, which sits closer to the kind of use their "spirit of sport" criterion is designed to flag. That's a separate issue from the medication's approved use in people managing obesity or type 2 diabetes, and this decision doesn't change anything about how these drugs are regulated, prescribed, or labeled by the FDA.
The Bottom Line
WADA's decision to monitor rather than prohibit GLP-1 drugs for 2027 reflects genuine scientific uncertainty about whether they meet the legal bar for a ban, not a determination that off-label athletic use is risk-free. Athletes considering these medications for any reason should talk to a licensed physician, both because self-directed use of a prescription drug carries its own risks and because the anti-doping landscape around this drug class is explicitly still being written.