Semaglutide is still not prohibited in sport. Most of what this site covers is.

The World Anti-Doping Agency published its 2027 List of Prohibited Substances and Methods in the week of 21 September 2026. The List was approved by WADA's Executive Committee at its meeting on 10 September 2026 and enters into force on 1 January 2027. One thing we could not settle, and would rather say than paper over: WADA's own announcement page would not serve to our requests, and the outlets that carried it give the publication day variously as 21, 22 and 23 September. The Executive Committee date is firm, is reported consistently, and is the one the decision actually turns on.

The decision that drew the coverage is that glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists — semaglutide and tirzepatide among them — were not added. Their status is unchanged for 2027, pending further data on what these drugs do to trained athletes rather than to patients with obesity. They remain instead on the Monitoring Program, which is a separate document with a different consequence: WADA collects data on how often a substance appears in samples, and no athlete is sanctioned for the finding. BBC Sport, whose report we read as carried by Yahoo Sports, quotes Professor Olivier Rabin, WADA's senior director for science and medicine, warning athletes to be "very careful using those drugs and never without medical advice and supervision". That is advice from a scientist, not a rule anyone can be charged under.

The threshold explains why this keeps not happening. A substance moves onto the Prohibited List only if it meets at least two of three criteria: that it can enhance sport performance, that it poses a health risk to the athlete, or that it violates the spirit of sport. On the reported reasoning the first of those is still open, and Rabin's own observation cuts against it — if an athlete loses muscle mass, he told the BBC, that "may be very counterproductive". The BBC report gives semaglutide as monitored since 2024 and tirzepatide as added to the programme this year.

Here is the part the sports desks have no reason to write, and this site does. Someone reading a vendor page sees semaglutide listed a few rows from BPC-157, TB-500 and ipamorelin, at comparable per-milligram prices, under the same research label, shipped from the same warehouse. In anti-doping terms those two groups are nowhere near each other. The List's first category, S0, is headed "Non-approved substances" and sits under the heading "Substances and methods prohibited at all times" — that much we read in WADA's own 2026 List, the document currently in force. S0 covers pharmacological substances not approved for human therapeutic use by any governmental regulatory authority, a category the Banned Substances Control Group reads as taking in research chemicals and unapproved peptides, and it names BPC-157 as an example. TB-500 it places under S2, peptide hormones and growth factors, where the rules apply irrespective of dose or route.

So the compound that a regulator has approved, that a prescriber can lawfully write, and that WADA has again declined to prohibit is the one most people assume is banned. The compounds nobody voted on are prohibited at all times, and they are prohibited precisely because nobody approved them. Being unapproved is not a gap in this system that a substance slips through. It is the trigger.

Our index puts a number on the asymmetry. As of today we hold confirmed listings for semaglutide from 27 of the vendors we read and tirzepatide from 32. For BPC-157 we hold 59, for ipamorelin 53 and for TB-500 40. The compounds an athlete may currently take without sanction are the harder ones to find on these sites. The ones that would end a career are on more shelves, cheaper, and are the ones marketed hardest to people who train.

Four cautions, because these categories get collapsed into one another constantly. Not prohibited in sport is not a safety finding and not an efficacy finding — WADA is not a medicines regulator and was not asked whether any of this works. It is not an FDA position, and it has no bearing on the July 2026 advisory committee recommendation on compounding, which is a different process in a different country and still requires rulemaking before it changes anything. It binds only athletes subject to anti-doping rules, which most readers of this site are not. And an athlete with a genuine medical need for a prohibited substance applies for a therapeutic use exemption; the List is where that conversation starts rather than where it ends.

One thing we are deliberately not claiming. We could not read the 2027 List itself, only reports of it. That coverage describes added examples and guidance under S0, revisions to the cannabinoid section, a newly permitted route of administration for glucocorticoids, and some substances leaving the Monitoring Program. It says nothing about what happened, if anything, to the sections covering the peptide hormones and the growth hormone secretagogues. We are not going to tell you those are unchanged on the strength of nobody having mentioned them. When we have the document in front of us, the regulatory lines on the profiles it touches will carry the date we checked it.