Taylor Hooton Foundation > Hoot’s Corner > General > ROSS TUCKER: about to become the first athlete jailed for doping
February 21, 2017
ROSS TUCKER: about to become the first athlete jailed for doping
Birahun, in other words, got the pointy end of a very short stick. While everyone else was going free or getting lenient bans, he’s going to jail.
Some will say “about time”. They believe that these harsher punishments are the only way to combat doping’s toxic effects on sport. At the very least, they‘ll argue, dopers should receive lifetime bans, with no prospects of ever returning to the sport.
After all, the decision to dope is one of risk versus reward. How likely am I to be caught and punished, weighed up against the money, prestige and future the drug may help me attain?
Going back three decades, there was no testing and thus no punishment. Athletes could dope with impunity, get all the benefits, and the risk of detection was effectively zero. As better testing came along, backed by bans, the balance tilted. Nowhere near enough, because if the probability of being caught is say, 5%, and is followed by a legal proceeding that might reduce a ban to say, one year, then the reward still outweighs the risk. Nevertheless, it‘s a more equitable balance now than it was.
Getting that balance right thus requires one of two things, and preferably both. Either the probability of being caught must increase enormously, or the sanction when caught must be harsher.
That’s the context into which life bans, and even more severely, criminal charges, have been introduced by Ethiopia (Germany has also introduced legislation to criminalise doping).
But here’s the problem: the punishment must fit the crime, and it also has to be backed up with reliable, unimpeachable evidence.
Right now, neither exists. Can you imagine being an athlete who inadvertently ingests a banned drug because your supplement was contaminated, and the next thing you know, you’re sharing a cell with John, who got six years for armed robbery?
Or consider the cases of so many athletes who are forced to take banned drugs by coaches (as happened in Russia), or who innocently take them because they‘re provided by a trusted coach or doctor as “necessary vitamins”. They’re not the criminals here, but would be the ones serving jail time.
It’s a preposterous idea, made more outrageous if you understand that the process of catching dopers is far from perfect. False positives, contestable testing procedures, and a general shakiness of the law and order that underpins doping, means that life bans, let alone jail time, ask more from the anti-doping system than it can currently provide.
So while Birahun and future inmates might represent a theoretical ideal for anti-doping, in reality they force it to confront its failings. Perhaps coaches and doctors should be the target of criminal proceedings, but only if the investigative procedures to catch them are as robust as we would expect from detectives investigating real crime. It is not right to criminalise an athlete for taking a chemical, given all the problems swirling in the anti-doping waters.
https://www.businesslive.co.za/rdm/sport/2017-02-20-ross-tucker-ethiopian-is-about-to-become-the-first-athlete-jailed-for-doping/