Re: Re:
Rob27172 said:
B_Ugli said:
Who do you get in to replace the problem?
If we take British Cycling in the UK my understanding is that due to the popularity of the sport there are 'go ride' schemes, regional development officers and a 'system' by which talent is identified and nurtured. I would guess that a lot of the people who are coaches & managers have come through the club system and possibly not 'tainted' by the normalisation of 'abnormal' practices so prevalent in the upper Professional echelons of the sport. This has got to be your starting point in replacing the problem (in an ideal world).
However this what was meant to be the essence of Team Sky and British Cycling under Dave Brailsford.
But even with this there are issues.
Its very difficult to know the ethical standpoint of those individuals within the grass roots of cycling in the UK. Certainly a lot wont speak out against British Cycling as they are employed by said organisation and it would amount to spitting in the soup/establishment. (This is what Nicole Cooke alludes to). Having said that there has got to be many who having devoted their hearts and souls to the cause feel enormously let down by the people who are now at the top of the tree. Whatever you think about doping the allegations surrounding the upper echelons on a human level it must be heart breaking for guys that eat/sleep/breath clean cycling and have hero worshipped Team Sky.
The other point is chemistry. My view is that after 30 odd years of doping scandals medicine legal or otherwise should be totally irradicated from the sport. Cycling is a sport in love with medicine. If that means telling 18 year old lads with asthma/allergies or conditions requiring TUE's that they will never be riding the TDF perhaps that is something that needs consideration in the future. If it means saying to a guy who comes down with a chest infection the day before his main goal of the year, sorry mate you cant race then so be it. I think the situation is so bad now that anything other than this degree of clarity/transparency is now necessary.
Again though not everyone shares my view who rides a bike (I wish they did), pulling 50 guys from grass roots to run British Cycling you can guarantee that a proportion will feel its okay to race whilst sick or take every medicine under the sun so long as its within the rules.
So then you are back to square one.
This is before you even consider UKAD/UCI & WADA and the General Medical Council that governs Doctors conduct.
But you get back to the fundamental question
Why do people cheat?
Cheating in sport has gone on long before medicinal assistance.
Tour de france cyclists riding trains, Marathon runners taking the subway or switching with twins, Changing birth certificates to forge ages for a little league world series.
Cheating happens at every level amateur and professional. The only reason we care about the professionals is that we align with them and are therefore tribally connected to them. So when they cheat they either let us down, if they are our team or athlete, or they deny our athlete or team the win.
So to say it is the administrators or the medicine or the money is missing the point.
Take the money away and you will get cheats
Take the administrators away and change the regime and you will get cheats
Take the testers and referees and change out all of them and you will get cheats
The only way you wont get cheating in sport
Take away the human element.
Itr is human nature to want to win at all costs and as such as long as you have human being participating in a competitive way - you will have cheating.
Cheating isn't restricted to sport. Sport could learn a lot from the lessons learnt by business in recent years. There are pretty stringent laws, codes of conduct, codes of ethics which apply to banks, investors etc. and which whilst not wiping out the problem entirely, have done a lot to clean up dodgy practices. Yes, there's still breaches etc., but the casual corruption/nepotism there used to be is a lot harder to get away with. Company's will do a lot to clean up their act when they know that their investors are watching like a hawk to make sure that they don't pay facilitation payments etc. And the reason that investors do this is that they are responsible under law to ensure that they are not involved with dodgy people. They are required to show due diligence. We should adopt a lot of the same approach to publicly funded sports organisations at every level. Frankly, I'd make cheating at high level sport a type of fraud - you're defrauding the public purse and damaging the reputation of the nation. If there's big money at stake for cheating, you need big consequences for doing so to balance the equation. Self-government really hasn't worked so far. The Directors of these outfits need to be held to account...so they are potentially ending up in chokey if they let stuff go on that shouldn't do whether through collusion or negligence.
The first thing I would do is force transparency on sports organisations or anyone accepting public money. All policies and procedures, investigations, etc etc. should be, by default, published, unless there is a good reason not to. That reason itself would be published, and has to be defensible. If not - no money. Obviously, you're going to have to apply some kind of minimum threshold so it doesn't get ridiculous and forbiddingly onerous for small organisations. But the more cash you get, the more professional the organisation and levels of scrutiny and accountability.
For the top end of sport, I'd also audit them like hell against those policies and procedures. Not just accounts, but their governance structures, organisation, ethics, etc etc etc. Frankly, I'd crawl all over them - HQ, medical facilities labs., sport's facilities, relationships with doctors and physios, research laboratories and so on. And I'd publish the audit report findings too, redacting only the absolute minimum. That's the kind of scrutiny that would help organisations walk the talk. And if you turned down an audit - no money. Cheating would still go on, of course, but it'd get more elaborate, and more deliberate.
To counter that, I'd have my own ZTP - by which I mean really stringent financial penalties for organisations who fail to clean up their act. Like no money for five years or something. As for people not wanting to speak out - well, in anti-bribery policies make NOT speaking out gross misconduct. And they must have whistle-blowing policies, procedures to protect anonymity, ensure confidentiality, support the whistle-blower etc. Again, I'd make that kind of approach compulsory for any organisation getting serious public funding.
Whilst we're at it, I'd include having to publish the number of TUEs as well. You might be able to justify not naming names for medical confidentiality reasons, but having to say how many you applied for might make the teams worry more about how they look to the public. They'd also have to explain why they have changed if they got worse year on year too.
I'd also be waaaaaaay more stringent on things like conflicts of interest - there should be declared policies and procedures to ensure that anyone with undue interests in teams / sponsors etc etc. are formally excluded from any decision-making. I'd have registers of donations, sponsorships, gifts, hospitality etc etc - the full works. And I'd check them, too, because the history of the sport shows you can't trust anyone.
And in the case of privately funded teams, it should be absolutely compulsory to go through the same kind of scrutiny to get a licence. We do this stuff with business and sport is a business now - it should be accountable at the same level. Of course, they'd still be cheating, but I'm damn sure it'd make it harder to do, and offer at least a significant disincentive.
Sadly, all this depends on the people running the sport actually wanting to crack down on the Darks Arts involved. But I fear, the heart of the problem is that they don't seem to want to. If Governments really had the appetite to deal with it, they could - like no Tour de France allowed on the roads unless you clean up your act and enforce this kind of discipline.
I deal with a lot of this stuff in a business context and frankly, I find it quite shocking how little accountability there appears to be. I'd give my eye teeth to do any of the above to any of the outfits in sports. Just for entertainment value.
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