Taggart highlights importance of anti-doping regulations

The Larne competitor shared her clean sport journey with Sport NI as part of this year’s campaign.

Claire, who is competing to reach the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, explained: “I think in all sport it’s really important that everybody competes clean.

“I’m someone with a severe physical disability and therefore take some medication. Making sure that’s all checked on Global DRO (The Global Drug Reference Online) and things like that.

"It’s also about the actual testing procedure and how that works and the adaptations for someone with a severe physical disability because a standard testing procedure or protocol might not work for someone with a severe physical disability.

"Within our world class programme we have an anti-doping lead. We also would say within our programme that we’re all responsible for our own anti-doping. All of us travel with an assistant or a carer. I travel with my dad, so he’s aware of everything and then my coach is very much involved in anti-doping education and clean sport as well.

"Boccia, our programme maintains that we do all the right education course and all that there, but I guess it’s up to ourselves as athletes and our assistants to make sure that what we ingest, or take, or apply, is clean.

"I think we’re all very good at keeping each other accountable and I think the teamwork element of it means that we constantly check and check each other. I think that anti-doping is really important in all sport.”