Sporting body not in favour of jailing drug cheats

Despite some countries turning to jailing convicted performance-enhancing drug cheats, chairman of the National Anti-Doping Commission Dr Adrian Lorde says there is no need for Barbados to go that route.

Speaking to Barbados TODAY, Dr Lorde acknowledged that countries such as Egypt had jailed coaches for providing performance-enhancing drugs to athletes such as weightlifters, but indicated he was not in favour of going that far in dealing with the drugs scourge on sports. He said that a new anti-doping code would be coming into effect in 2021 that would help in the anti-doping fight in several areas.

“What we need to do is to work together with all the agencies in the fight. For instance, we need to work with customs and courier companies who may be some of the sources of, not they themselves, but who will be able to help with trafficking. Through them, we will be able to fight some of the importation of the drugs. We will work with our educational people to seek to educate our athletes more about the dangers of it and make them aware of anti-doping,” he said, adding that the National Anti-doping Commission would try to implement more testing both in and out of competition in a larger number of sports in Barbados this year.

He said jailing drug cheats was being used as a deterrent and obviously some people would want to use this to assist them in the fight. But he stressed those countries going that route were perhaps faced with a situation where the measures they had used in the past had not helped their specific situations.

“Going back to Egypt, their weightlifting federation is banned by the Olympic Committee and the weightlifting federation is now not recognised by the international body because of the doping that has occurred there in that particular sport. We don’t have that type of problem here in Barbados; at least that we know of.

“I think those countries have tried other methods and they’re using this [criminalizing drug cheating] as an additional method,” he said.

Dr Lorde explained that the Ministry of Sport in Barbados had set up a National Compliance Platform on Anti-doping that would look at, among other things, legislation against doping in sports, drugs in sports and drug use in sports. He added that the new world anti-doping code that was coming on stream in 2021 was expected to be more athlete-friendly. “It will assist athletes, both the athletes who might be caught, it is the entourage, the coaches, the trainers. It’s the doctors and other athlete support personnel, who may be responsible for it [doping].

“So it [new world anti-doping code] will give the countries and anti-doping organisations more power to ban those people. It will be a little stiffer as far as the penalties on athletes, but there will be provisions put in place, for instance, if it is found that other persons are involved or if the athletes speak up and name other athletes, coaches or persons, the penalty that they will serve will be a lot lesser,” he indicated.

The former chairman of the Caribbean Regional Anti-Doping Organisation said there were avenues for athletes to inform on their colleagues if they suspected they were involved in doping. He said WADA had a platform called “speak up” which encouraged whistleblowers to come forward and not face any consequences.

“And they have encouraged other anti-doping organizations to lay that type of platform or programme in place. The difficulty we have in being a small society is that it would be more difficult to organize, and because of our limited resources in the Barbados situation. But speaking as chairman of the National Anti-doping Commission, it is something that we will look at in the future as well,” he said.

Despite the WADA code serving as an international framework to deal with cases of doping, countries have gone ahead to police the practice by assigning jail sentences to those responsible for taking performance-enhancing drugs and those who supply them.

In 2015, Germany passed legislation that gave up to three years’ jail time for athletes found guilty of doping, and 10 years for those who supplied them. Kenya also has plans to make ¬doping a criminal offence this year.

WADA has previously issued a statement on criminalising doping, saying it was not in favour of jail sentences for guilty athletes, and citing also the structure already in place to deal with such matters.

“The agency believes that the sanction process for athletes, which includes a right of appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, is a settled process, accepted by all governments of the world, and further that the sanctions for a doping violation by an athlete, which now includes a longer, four-year period of ineligibility, have been globally accepted by sport and government. As such, the agency does not believe that doping should be made a ¬criminal offence for athletes,” WADA indicated.