WADA warns against criminals taking control in sport

LONDON. Wada Director General, David Howman, once again stressed his warnings that the integrity of sport is in danger of being eroded by a criminal underworld not only making huge profits on selling illegal doping substances but also being involved in money laundering, bribery and other forms of corruption.

In his keynote speech at the international doping conference ‘Tackling Doping in Sport’ in London on 16-17 March 2011, Howman emphasised that the increasing engagement of the criminal underworld in providing prohibited substances through trafficking and distribution is one of the biggest challenges to the fight against doping in sport.

According to David Howman, the criminals are attracted by huge returns on small investments and the low risk of being caught.

“For 100 dollars you might get a return of anything between 10,000 and 100,000 dollars,” Howman said, repeating his earlier warning that the same criminals are working on several levels and thereby challenging the whole integrity of sport.

“They are also involved in money laundering, bribery and corruption.  We get it in the anti-doping world. Doping control officers are being bribed – or tempted to be bribed. There have been examples of laboratories being subject to brown envelopes, and we would be totally naïve if we thought that it is not going to be bigger, of course it is. So we are going to do something about it.”

“Don’t reinvent the wheel”
In February David Howman called for a new World Sports Integrity Agency to be set up by governments and sport in cooperation using the WADA model. Such an agency would have to deal with doping, as well as illegal betting and other forms of corruption in world sport.

But so far the idea of an ‘enlarged WADA’ fighting all sorts of criminal activities inside the sport movement has not been met with much enthusiasm by the established sports world led by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Instead the IOC has decided to establish a working group, which is only going to make proposals on how illegal betting and match-fixing can be handled more effectively.

Commenting on the IOC initiative, David Howman still thinks that a broader working integrity agency would be the right solution.

“What I was saying is don’t reinvent the wheel when you’ve got a system or a process in place which works, where governments work alongside sport. The WADA model was pretty useful. I’m not saying it should be WADA work, but you can easily expand the WADA model to something that can encompass these issues,” Howman argues, referring to the criminal underworld and its broad engagement in doping, illegal betting and corruption.

“It’s not different people. So if you set up different organisations to deal with the same issue, then you’ve got a problem of sharing the information. (…) And I just think that you’ve got to be sensible in the way that you go forward with your project. Now the ‘IOCs’ don’t do that. I just have to sit back now and wait to see how they do it.”

Clever athletes avoid detecting
Apart from tackling the criminal underworld, David Howman sees a broad range of challenges that will have to be confronted if the fight against doping in sports is going to be more successful – spanning over increasing costs, legal challenges, more sophisticated doping methods and more confident doping users.

“The cheating athlete is becoming better at cheating. The sophisticated cheating athlete is becoming very good at cheating. Some of those are now addressing the issue in a very confident fashion saying: I am going to avoiding detection. ”

“Science alone cannot deal with the problem. We cannot rely on collecting urine and blood and say to the population that that is going eradicate doping. It doesn’t, it won’t, it never will. But it’s got to be a part of what we do in terms of the fight.”

Even the new and more efficient biological passports based on blood profiles, which have been introduced by the International Cycling Union (UCI) and are supported by WADA, have their limits. Apart from being costly and complex – the UCI alone spends 4.3 million Swiss Francs yearly on the biological passport program – blood sampling and analyses cannot detect all illegal substances or the most advanced doping programs using micro doses of EPO.  

As discussed at the London conference by the researchers Michael Ashenden and Paul Scott, the efficiency of the passports can be improved if you introduce midnight testing of athletes, shorten the time between testing and the laboratory analysis, or make ‘no start-rules’ requiring less evidence than a normal doping bans. But such proposals also have downsides making the doping control even more expensive and raising serious questions on athletes’ rights.

Despite the limitations of the biological passports, David Howman still sees them as a big step forward and he encourages other sports to follow in the footsteps of the UCI.

“To do that, you’ve got to collect blood, and I must say that I am extremely disappointed at the scarcity of blood collection through the world. We don’t collect it, therefore we don’t analyse for it, therefore athletes are home free by using those substances. That’s ridiculous. We’ve all got excuses. It’s too hard, we have to send out someone more professional than our normal doping control officers; it can’t be transported quickly enough. Hang on! What are we supposed to be trying to do here? Stopping doping! So please, collect blood.”

Intelligence gathering and unorthodox ideas
According to Howman, another answer could be putting more emphasis on gathering evidence through inquires, investigations and a strengthened cooperation between national anti-doping agencies, the police, the customs, etc. In the UK a special unit working under the UK anti-doping agency is already collecting information to target the testing program and to produce direct evidence against people involved in doping.

WADA’s Director General is even open to discussing more unorthodox ways to fight doping in sport:

“Some have mentioned to me that it might be better, for example, if the French national anti-doping agency tested in Germany and the German national anti-doping agency tested in France. Then they wouldn’t be protecting their own. Most national bodies are pretty keen on those across the border rather than the ones that are living in their own boundaries. Maybe we should change. That’s a challenge but I’m just putting it out here.”

“Or maybe we should pay the members of the national anti-doping agency as an incentive to catch a doper. Maybe we should put out a reward system, you know, 50,000 dollars for each dope caught correctly and appropriately, adhering to the rights of the athlete, all of the proper protocols in place. Would that make a difference? I don’t know. But maybe we’ve got to think about this.”

An athlete friendlier Code
What Davis Howman does not want is an even more complex World Anti-Doping Code, when the next review of the Code is to be confirmed during the 4th World Conference on Doping in Sport in Johannesburg in November 2013.

”I hope the result will be a simple document. I don’t want to see a more complex set of rules. None of our stakeholders want the rules to be more complex. All you need to do is to read them yourselves and say:  Can I understand them? Am I able to tell the athletes what it means? I have had many complaints from athlete groups saying, ‘Can’t you make it athlete friendlier?’ So that is something we want to really emphasise during this next review.”

The conference Tackling Doping in Sport 2011 was held at Twickenham Stadium, London, the 16th and 17th of March. The conference was arranged by World Sports Law Report.

The homepage of the conference:

http://www.tacklingdopinginsport.com/index.asp