The BOA is likely to lose the battle over its lifetime ban for drugs cheats, but the body insists it will retain the moral high ground
An increasingly toxic saga that links the combative British Olympic Association chairman, Lord Moynihan, a "male enhancement" product called ExtenZe, the eminent QC Michael Beloff, the British athletes David Millar and Dwain Chambers, and the future of the fight against illegal doping took another turn in Montreal this weekend.
With the air of a resigned parent admonishing a misbehaving toddler, the World Anti-Doping Agency president, John Fahey, said he was "very disappointed it has come to this" as the BOA was ruled "non-compliant" with Wada's universal code. The BOA, meanwhile, believes that its stance is morally correct and could set the tenor of the fight against doping for the next decade.
At issue is the lifetime ban from Olympic competition that the BOA imposes on any British athlete hit with a suspension of six months or more for drug offences. In practice, as Moynihan repeatedly points out, its appeal mechanism means that only those who are banned for knowingly ingesting performance-enhancing substances receive life bans. So Christine Ohuruogu and 28 others have won appeals and she was free to win gold in Beijing despite a ban for three missed tests, while the sprinter Dwain Chambers, the cyclist David Millar and the shot-putter Carl Myerscough remain suspended from the Games for life.
Wada, having taken legal advice, strongly believes that the upshot of a ruling last month by the court of arbitration for sport is that the BOA's bylaw, in place since 1992, is no longer compliant with its code.
The Cas said that the IOC's "rule 45", introduced ahead of the Beijing Games, was an unfair additional sanction and not, as the IOC argued, an eligibility rule. It believes the same legal logic holds for the BOA. Moynihan and his board disagree.
As such LaShawn Merritt ? suspended for 21 months after taking the banned substances 5-DHEA and pregnenolone, which he proved beyond reasonable doubt were present in his system as a result of ingesting a "male enhancement product" called ExtenZe that he bought from a 7-Eleven store ? is free to compete in London.
Sunday's move by Wada, the latest in a complex chess game between the various acronyms involved in governing global Olympic sport, brings the prospect of Millar and Chambers being able to do the same a step closer. They should know their fate within the next three to four months, making them eligible for selection if the BOA's rule is struck down by the Cas.
Being declared "non-compliant" eight months from a home Games is undoubtedly embarrassing for the BOA, but will at least lead to a scenario where the lifetime ban is tested at the Cas. Through a fog of legal letters and semantics, this is what the BOA last week said it wanted after Wada wrote suggesting that the body have the rule reviewed in the wake of the Merritt case.
Wada responded that it had no intention of accompanying the BOA to the Cas in Lausanne and was merely advising it of the legal position as a signatory to the Wada code and recommending it had the bylaw reviewed. But the BOA believes that Wada will have no choice but to go to the Cas if it appeals against the decision to find it non-compliant.
At its simplest, the row boils down to this. Should the Olympics be treated as a special case and each country have the right to impose its own selection criteria? Or should all athletes be treated the same and a universal, global set of rules to combat doping be applied?
Most legal experts expect the BOA to lose the battle over the bylaw but, as far as Moynihan is concerned, it will retain the moral high ground and the support of the 90% of British athletes it claims back the ban. It would back down reluctantly, allowing the trio of banned athletes to compete while underlining its opposition and drawing attention to what it believes are deficiencies in Wada's approach.
Wada's move has already led the BOA to highlight the irony inherent in the fact it is essentially being admonished by the global anti-doping body for being too tough on drug cheats. Yet Wada might retort that there is also irony in a national Olympic association that signed up to Wada's universal creed defiantly making a virtue of its desire to be different.
The day before he made public Wada's latest letter advising the BOA to review its ban, Moynihan delivered a wide-ranging attack on the anti-doping movement that was later damned by Wada as an "emotional tirade" distributed through a "vitriolic spray".
Through his speech ? a much-needed reality check or an error-strewn diatribe, depending on which side you listen to ? the BOA chairman was attempting to frame the debate over the next review of the Wada code in 2013. He believes that the millions poured into Wada ? a 50-50 joint venture between national governments and sport ? are delivering a poor return. He believes that the penalties for the worst offenders are too soft to discourage cheats and those meted out to those who innocently ingest substances on the banned list are too harsh. But advocates of the Wada system would immediately counter: how can you tell? The entire Wada approach is based on the creed of "strict liability" ? that athletes are ultimately responsible for what goes into their bodies and that missed tests are as serious as failed ones.
Moynihan also claims that Wada has done little to combat industrial-scale doping and that the biggest breakthroughs, including the Balco bust, have been through law enforcement agencies. Wada says that spectacularly misses the point ? that it is precisely because of closer co-operation between the anti-doping world and law enforcement that decent progress has been made.
Moynihan also complains that too many countries have not made enough progress towards bringing their testing programmes up to the gold standard elsewhere. This is a thorny, and emotive, issue. While there is a widespread acceptance that testing programmes in some countries will take longer to reach the standard of the developed world, there is also mounting frustration over their willingness or ability to do so. As with any supranational organisation, slow drift and an overload of administration are ever-present dangers. On the other hand, global consensus to tackle a global problem was the entire foundation on which Wada was built.
There may be a middle ground ? with harsher penalties for those caught but an end to the sort of lifetime bans imposed by the BOA that offer no opportunity for redemption. But that would also rely on international sporting federations and national governments ensuring consistency in the penalties applied.
What appears on the outside to be a black and white issue is a complex moral maze once you get inside. Others have pointed to the case of the heavyweight boxer Simon Vallily, who last year won Commonwealth Games gold and hopes to compete in London. Six years ago, he was sentenced to four years in a young offenders' institute after a violent, unprovoked knife attack while high on drugs, but found his redemption in the ring and will be free to compete in London. Yet Linford Christie is banned for life from an official presence at the Games after his disputed failed test in 1999. And J�rgen Gr�bler, who has overseen the most successful period in the history of British rowing, has admitted being involved in programmes in his native East Germany where young athletes were administered drugs in the 1970s, though he has never failed a test.
There will be plenty who argue that Chambers and Millar, the latter now a vocal advocate of drug-free sport who will be present at the London Games as a Wada ambassador if he is not allowed to compete, should be offered the same shot at redemption. Whatever the outcome of the narrow technical dispute over whether they can compete in London, the broader issues it raises will persist long beyond the closing ceremony.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/nov/21/british-olympic-association-wada-doping
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