The Industry Column – 27 July
Drugs in sport has hit the headlines this week like never before with
the Tour de France once more in disarray and golf, athletics and the Olympics
all under the microscope. In this week’s SIG Column, Michele Verroken, former
anti-doping director at UK Sport, asks why athletes don’t seem to want to
change…
The warning signs have been evident for several years.
In 2001 IOC president Jacques Rogge announced that ‘doping was the biggest
threat to the credibility of sport in the 21st Century’, and in 2006 sport
business leaders at the FT Sport Industry Summit concluded the use of
performance enhancing drugs was their biggest concern about the future of
sport.
Recent events in the Tour de France, positive tests in athletics, baseball
and wrestling, coupled with Gary Player’s allegations about golf have confirmed
it – doping is the most widespread method of cheating in sport.
Despite the well signposted threat of testing and publicised commitments by
cyclists to repay earnings if found doping, the doping scandals of the Tour
dominate the sporting press.
Sponsors and media caught in the headlights are pulling out of their
association with drug cheats. When will the sporting world wake up to the
reality that official anti-doping responses are failing to strike to the very
heart of the problem? Anti-doping efforts have become bureaucratic, overly
concerned with compliance and full of self important autocrats.
Athletes are the least trusted individuals in society, requiring 24 hour
surveillance and becoming ‘strictly liable’ for what they eat and drink, for
those who they trust to train them, to treat their injuries and who they
socialise with.
Almost every sport is claiming to have the most rigorous testing programme;
nearly every country claims to lead the world in its anti-doping purge. The
business of sport is in a spin about whether investment in sport is safe.
In truth the solution is simple, athletes have got to want to change
behaviour, incentives to compete drug-free must be there.
If we are to believe Nelson Mandela that sport has the power to change
peoples lives, we need to know that it will change athletes who cheat into
athletes who won’t.
Changing athletes’ attitudes to doping needs more than some well intentioned
booklet about the harm that drugs do. It needs a better understanding of the
pressures of competing and performing, it needs solutions that promote respect
for sport and make the career choice to dope financially untenable.
Ex-dopers should not be given celebrity status, sporting fraud is sporting
fraud.
Doping in sport is a big issue and we should care. Leadership is needed; its
time sport businesses made it clear where they stand. Most governing bodies
have reached the limits of their influence to keep sport drug-free.
If the business of sport stood up to athletes who dope and made it clear they
are not prepared to back cheats and may even want their money back, it would
certainly focus the minds of athletes and sports bodies.
Michele Verroken is director of Sporting Integrity, the sports
business consultancy for the business of sport.
