icefire said:
I appreciate the very valid comments my post on this thread has generated. However, the issue is quite simple for me:
1) If an athlete takes PEDs he is harming himself, so the State should not prosecute him
2) If an athlete takes PEDs he is breaking the sport's rules, so the sport's authorities should prosecute him
3) If a doctor, coach or team manager gives PEDs to an athlete he is harming other, so he should be prosecuted by the State for offence to public health
4) If a doctor, coach or team manager gives PEDs to an athlete he is inducing the athlete to break the sports rules, so he should also be sanctioned by sports authorities based on the findings of the trial in the Justice court
5) For those who put money in sport (be it the a public or a private organisation), a clause in their contracts covering the case of an athlete being found guilty of taking PEDs would be enough. Common trade and commerce laws would do the rest in the Justice court
The current mess comes from the fact that not everyone agrees with points 1 and 2 in this list. To me is a no-brainer: State Law must be separated from sports rules, like State Law is separated from Religion Law (at least in some countries)
In fact I
don't agree with point 2.
Look, it's like the disaster of deregulation at Wall Street. Washington put the chief investment bankers, i.e. those who stood to make the most money from a financial market without rules, in charge of regulating it. And this is what mostly led to the disaster.
The same governing sport bodies, for the same conflict of interests, have led to the curruption that has prevented real justice from being done.
So call it what you want, the State or something else, but there needs to be an independent, unbiased and higher authority in regulating sport, becuase organizations like the UCI are currupt to the gills and polluted with a conflict of interests which has allowed the farce to go on far far too long now.
And State law changed in Spain, the moment OP came out, however there wasn't the political will to make the new law retroactive so as to allow further investigation of the those involved in Fuente's register (though after a few foreign riders had to pay a heavy price for their affiliation).
Not that the State needs to be directly involved with prosecuting the accused, but it should legaly force the governing bodies of sport, the UCI, the IOC, that of pro soccer, etc. to adhere to an independent body invested with legal authority over themselves, and theoretically without a conflict of interests, to arbitrate and judge in matters of athletes doping offences, or their using of medics and labs for a doping purpose.
That the doctors and the labs, or whatever network structure, exists to facilitate doping, should be directly prosecuted and punished by the State is without question.
Of course there is one huge problem with all of this: namely that often the State itself is plagued with the same curruption and conflict of interests as all the rest. Because, as BroDeal correctly points out, the State already finances with public funds the stadiums. The rest coming from the same corporate entities, whose lobbies finance the political campaigns which get them elected into office. Consequently if you have this Joe politician that recieved huge campain funds from this multinational corporation, which has invested massive sums of money in the baseball or soccer stadiums and the teams that perform in them, as well as in the television rights to broadcast them: they thus collectively become propagandistc marketing tools to drive up corporate sales - and this is why it is easy to see how there is no political will to bring out to the public, the full weight of cases like OP in terms of illicit behavior and curruption in the world of sport culture today because it's bad corporate PR. Sport enterprise simply generates too huge, gargantuan sums of cashflow for the corporations and their political lobbists and it is likely the soccer contingent in OP that broke any political will to see justice done as a result with a retroactive law in Spain. Italian soccer and it's politicians are no better...
So we haven't evolved in this sense one iota since the ancient Roman Empire, which gave the world for the first time "sport culture" in their cities' amphitheaters and circuses. Indeed real political lobbies eventually did form around the circus chariot race teams (the reds, the blues, the greens and the whites) known as
factiones. And Martial knew 2000 years ago what his political officials understood then, just as today's corporate world still realizes all too well:
panem et circensis - give the people "bread and circuses" and you can bend them to your will, control the stadiums and you control them.
So our sport culture, just as it was in the times of the Classical Roman state, exists within this corporate-political structure that will likely prevent real ethical practice from ever being achieved.
Though the first thing that would need to be done, is to break the corporate lobbies which finance the politicians and to place the sport governing bodies themselves under some form of independent regulation and absolutely take them out of self-regulating thier various sports.
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