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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 499-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
DRUGS AND ROLE MODELS IN SPORT
Tuesday 27 April 2004 MR D MOORCROFT, MS H JACOBS and MR M RICHARDSON RT HON R CABORN, MP and MR S HODGSON Evidence heard in Public Questions 195 - 295
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 27 April 2004 Members present Mr Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair Chris Bryant Michael Fabricant Mr Adrian Flook Charles Hendry Alan Keen Rosemary McKenna Derek Wyatt ________________ Memorandum submitted by UK Athletics Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr David Moorcroft, Chief Executive, Ms Helen Jacobs, Operations Director, and Mr Mark Richardson, Athlete, UK Athletics, examined. Chairman: Lady and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming here. The Inquiry is well underway, and we had an excellent session last week, and I am sure this one will be as good. Q195 Derek Wyatt: Good morning. Mark, I wonder if I could address my first set of questions to you. When you went through the mill over this drug testing and then you lost your chance to be in the Sydney Olympics, were you financially compensated by anybody? Mr Richardson: No, I was not financially compensated. I think that is one of the flaws of the system actually, the fact that it is means-dependent as to the level of defence that an athlete can raise for themselves. I was in the fortunate position whereby I was able to finance getting a barrister and a legal team on board - although it was not actually the route I wanted to go down, because I wanted to cooperate with the governing bodies and the regulative bodies to try and understand what happened and what led to me having a positive test in the first place. No, I was not compensated. Q196 Derek Wyatt: Not only were you not compensated but you had your own expenses to pay too. If you do not want to say how much it was you do not have to but I will nevertheless ask you what your legal costs were? Mr Richardson: In terms of legal costs alone it must have been close to £50,000, but if you factor in the races I missed, having to withdraw from the Olympics, who knows what my earnings potential could have been through the races I missed. Q197 Derek Wyatt: Did your sponsors conveniently slip under the door and just go away, or did they stay loyal to you? Mr Richardson: No, my sponsors were fantastic. They believed in me; all the people who were close to me, in terms of giving me financial support, stood by me because they knew I was telling the truth. Q198 Chairman: Before you go on, I would be interested to know - it has always struck me that there is, arguably, some breach of human rights in all of these private proceedings, whether it is the FA or other organisations, which are proceeding against people alleged to have broken rules; and, as one might put them, these "private trials", to people interested in human rights issues, do raise questions. Do you sign some kind of agreement, the equivalent of a pre-marital agreement, which precludes you from considering taking action under human rights legislation? Mr Richardson: I think it is an unwritten agreement. The fact that you are an athlete competing under the IAAF's rules and general restrictions, whatever the case may be, you go into an unwritten contract. The fact the IAAF are based in Monaco means you could not take legal action against them anyway. I think it is an unwritten code: these are the rules of the sport, and you abide by them, as simple as that. Q199 Derek Wyatt: I was going to ask what the contractual obligations were between you two, David. Could you explain that to us? Mr Moorcroft: The jurisdiction sits usually with the national governing body, but ultimately with the international governing body. Mark is right, whatever is signed is really an understanding between governing body and athlete but it does not preclude them from taking legal action, nor should it. The process now has become pretty legal but there is a rule in sport that is embedded in sport of strict liability; where the governing body does not have to prove intent but merely whether it is present or not. That rule, and any other element of whether it is strength of trade or human rights element, will only really be tested when athletes (and I use that word generically) go through the courts. For the most part, the courts have tended to leave sport alone, rightly or wrongly. Q200 Derek Wyatt: On the compensation issue, he has no right to ask you or the IAAF for any compensation for genuine mistakes made - tough? Mr Moorcroft: The rights would be through the courts. It works both ways. I agree with a lot of what Mark says in terms of the cost and where the onus sits at the moment. Equally with the governing body, which effectively has to prosecute the case, that costs a lot of money; if the athlete loses the case then the governing body does not claim costs against the athlete, so it works both ways. It is true of many aspects of our legal system, the costs sit with the people who defend or prosecute. Q201 Derek Wyatt: What would you like to change? You have just said, more or less, that it is legal and that is the best system - but is that the best system? There is a Court of Arbitration in Lausanne, is that never used, ever, by the IAAF? Mr Moorcroft: It actually is now. The IAAF used to do their own appeals, but they now use the Court of Arbitration for Sport. One of our feelings, having read some of the evidence before talking about the notion of an independent agency, is the part of the process we think should be independent is the disciplinary part. I think that is a huge weakness within the British system - each governing body deals with the disciplinary side in their own way and often quite inconsistently. I believe in this country, if we really are going to take anti-doping seriously - and there is a serious amount of public money now being invested in sport, either through Exchequer or Lottery funding - that the independence element should be the way in which anti-doping cases are handled. Effectively, there should be a UK CAS, that sort of model, which deals with things consistently and cost-effectively. Q202 Derek Wyatt: Would that stop you having the legal responsibility? Mr Moorcroft: There is a certain degree of selfishness in this. There is a massive onus on the governing bodies, as there is with the athletes, to handle the legal costs, and they are huge. I think the governing bodies should contribute to that process. The notion is, if we really are going to take it seriously, there should be consistency in all aspects of anti-doping in this country. There should be a consistent definition of out-of-competition testing, and that currently is inconsistent; and each governing body should deal with positive findings in the same way so the public understand there is consistency in this country. The penalties should be consistent, and at the moment they are inconsistent. Q203 Derek Wyatt: Are you surprised about this report that has been commissioned which says the opposite? It seems to me that only football wants to do its own testing; the rest of all the major sports in the country are happy to give it to an independent body. I know who commissioned the report but I do not understand how it can come against the wishes of the major sports. Mr Moorcroft: There are two elements to the anti-doping process: one is how you police it, the education, the organisation of the tests, contracting with the laboratory; and actually that bit of it, handled by UK Sport, within UK Sport or externally, really does not matter too much to us - it works reasonably well. The other element is the disciplinary process: what do you do when you get an adverse finding? Everything, pre-adverse finding, could be handled the way it is at the moment. To us, the fact that UK Sport does it is not the end of the world. I think post-adverse finding is where we most need the independent agencies, and I think that is something the report missed. In the States USADA does both, and it could be argued there could be an in-built conflict of interest there. As far as we are concerned, independence is more about post-adverse finding than it is pre-adverse finding. I do not know whether I have explained that very well. Q204 Derek Wyatt: Last week in some of the evidence they were holding up the American system to be the best system, and you are saying that perhaps it is not. Explain the conflict of interest and please excuse my ignorance? Ms Jacobs: In the American system, as I understand it, they take the whole process all the way through, right through the results management, organising the testing programme, through to the disciplinary process. Our submission is that it is not appropriate to have those two activities within the same body, because you have got the potential conflict of interest arising having those things within the same organisation. The way we would like to see it is, once an adverse finding has been reported that is not backed-up by a Therapeutic Use Exemption so there is not a case to answer, that the process then would be taken on for all sports by an independent disciplinary body. The purpose of that would be to ensure there was a consistency of approach across all sports, which would give particularly the smaller sports the opportunity to actually have a robust process - whereas at the moment in smaller governing bodies it must be very difficult from a resource and financial perspective to be able to conduct the process in the way they would want to. Q205 Alan Keen: Mark, you must have talked to so many people who actually perform as athletes and in other sports. It is very important what people participating in sports think. We are pretty familiar with what the governing bodies believe. What did you feel when you listened to other people? Mr Richardson: I think the drug testing system we have got, with regard to UK sport and UK athletics, should be applauded. The fact that we have so much out-of-competition testing is fantastic, and all athletes want that. All athletes want to compete in a clean sport. They want to know they are competing on an equal footing. That has to be applauded and kept going. I think where the inconsistencies lie - and I had the unique experience of being there once I failed my test - it was very strange, because the relationship I had with UK Athletics was that they were a counsellor to me, they were a confidant, they told me the processes I was going to go through, through the disciplinary hearing, yet they were also the prosecution. For an athlete it is very confusing. I think it would be much fairer if that process were taken out of UK Athletics' hands and put into some third party - association, governing body whatever the case may be - so they can become the prosecutor and they can try your case as fairly as possible. Q206 Alan Keen: Did you talk to other athletes, footballers, or other sports people about the problem? You must have had discussions at different times? Mr Richardson: I have spoken to other people in other sports. Certainly the issue of supplementation is a worrying one and it keeps recurring in conversations. I think there needs to be some action taken - whether it is from WADA or from the government. I think there needs to be some kind of safe list in terms of supplementations that athletes can use (and I use the word generically in terms of sportsmen and sportswomen across all sports); so there is a list of supplements which has a kite mark which are deemed safe; they are produced up to a pharmaceutical grade, and everyone knows that they can take these products and not fall foul of the system. I think that is absolutely essential, and everyone is crying out for that from all sports. Q207 Alan Keen: As well as looking at drugs in sport, we are also addressing in this inquiry role models in sport. Still looking at you, Mark, do you feel that athletes and other sports people should really think about what they portray to younger people? Mr Richardson: Absolutely. I think it is absolutely crucial to have role models. I think sports provide a fantastic platform for that. The reason I got involved in sport in the first place was because of role models. I watched my very first Olympics back in 1984, and watching someone like Carl Lewis, who set the world alight and re-wrote the record books single-handedly, captured my imagination and made me want to become an athlete myself. Sportsmen and sportswomen are in a very privileged position and they have to take accountability for themselves and they have to conduct themselves in a proper manner. Absolutely, they have to conduct themselves as role models because they have a very powerful and influencing effect on the younger generation. Q208 Alan Keen: I am a bit envious - never mind the 1984 Olympics, I watched the 1948 Olympics! David, why is there a reluctance in the country in other sports to come under one umbrella body? Why do you think football, for instance, does not want to? Mr Moorcroft: I cannot speak on behalf of football, but I actually think the majority of sports would prefer to come under an independent organisation - be it totally independent of all elements, or independent in terms of disciplinary. There was a time when there was not a huge amount of public money in sport and sports got used to doing their own thing. Because there is a huge investment from the public purse, I think all sport (no matter how high profile they are), if they take public money, should adhere to rules that we all agree on. The notion of consistency in anti-doping, to me, is pivotal to the ethos of sport in this country; and, as such, sports should only receive public funding if they are prepared to act in a consistent way. The inconsistencies at the moment are frustrating. Having said that, I believe the vast majority of sports deal with anti-doping very well, and would wish to be part of a consistent, independent process in this country. Q209 Alan Keen: Looking at other sports as outsiders, have any of you seen any incidents on television in the last couple of weeks which have made you feel that they were not the right role models for sports - any actions you have seen? Mr Moorcroft: Since 1948, through 1984 to 2004 sports people illustrate the best and the worst of human behaviour, and I think that is inevitable. The profile they get now exacerbates that. I do agree with Mark, many people believe that the primary purpose of a sports person is to achieve and it does not matter how they behave; but I do believe that behaviour is important. I equally recognise that probably sport, more than anything else, illustrates the worst and the best of people's behaviour. I do not think I have answered that question! Q210 Alan Keen: In some cases athletics portrays the best and football, in the last couple of weeks, has portrayed some of the worst. Mr Moorcroft: Athletics has got its fair share of the good and the bad, as have all sports; but the vast majority, thankfully, illustrate the very best of what you would hope to inspire future generations. Q211 Alan Keen: I cannot get you to criticise footballers or remarks of football supporters! Mr Richardson: I can criticise Liverpool football team at the moment for their woeful performances! I think it is unfair to say, because footballers are in the media spotlight. They are on television week in and week out; pretty much every day of the week there is a football match. If you trawl through enough footage of course you are going to see an incident which is unsavoury, but I think that is a reflection of society. Just as I am sure you have the majority of footballers who are wonderful footballers who are wonderful role models - people like Alan Shearer - you are going to have other people at the other end of the spectrum who probably let themselves and the country down, and do not act as a role model. I think it is unfair to harshly criticise. Q212 Alan Keen: Do you think it is unfair that any sports person should be expected to be a role model when they spend so much of their time training and working at their profession? Do you think it is unfair that they should be judged at all? Mr Richardson: No, I do not because they are living the dream. They are doing what the majority of the population would not be able to do. They are in a privileged position. I think with that come certain responsibilities and they have to accept that. Mr Moorcroft: I think we know the future of our sport is built on positive role models, because parents have a huge influence and parents will watch a sport and wish, or not, their children to take part in that sport. I would like to think that in athletics the vast majority of parents would love to think, "We like what we see. We would like our child involved". Yes, I think they have got a responsibility. Q213 Rosemary McKenna: It is about parents, and I have a concern that sometimes parents are over-competitive, and that the pressure they put on children to perform and be successful is a negative aspect of it. I very much support what happens in sport and being role models and doing it properly, but is there any way you can deal with that aspect? Mr Moorcroft: I think it is a very good point. We are doing some work at the moment with younger athletes and their parents, and Paula Radcliffe's parents are helping with this. What is the ideal parent? People often say that to be successful in sport you have got to choose your parents carefully. That is not just in terms of the abilities you inherit, but in many respects they are your first guide. It is definitely important that we get it right in sport. As you rightly say, I used to be a PE teacher and saw some of the worst examples of parental behaviour. We give a lot of help to coaches; we give help to teachers; we give help to athletes; but we very often forget the parents. Q214 Rosemary McKenna: It is now recognised that there is a problem? Mr Moorcroft: It is recognised that at the moment not enough is done. We are looking at that issue at the moment. To us, that issue starts with junior international but probably a lot of the damage is done before then. Q215 Rosemary McKenna: I know it starts at primary school, because I taught in primary school and something which always concerned me was the kind of pressure, and I think it happens to young football teams. Mr Richardson: It is something you have to be very wary of. If you put too much pressure on youngsters they can be burnt out by the time they are teenagers. We want people to have longevity in sport, and realise the benefits of taking part in healthy endeavours, and also to enjoy it. I think that is the most important thing: you have to have fun. The reason why I got involved in athletics in the first place was because I really enjoyed it and was really passionate about it. I think that is the most essential thing - for youngsters to enjoy what they are doing. Q216 Chairman: Like everybody in this room, I have thought about it and wondered if it is fair to expect sportsmen and sportswomen to act as role models, taking into account that all they want to do is play the sport. On the other hand, as they move forward they are accepting a deal, are they not? I would have thought the first time anybody signs an autograph he or she is accepting that there is a counterpart responsibility there. Perhaps others have seen it, but in New York earlier this year (and the play was on in Britain too) I saw a play called Take Me Out about a very prominent baseball player who came out as gay and did not want to act as a role model for gay baseball players; but the view was taken, and it seemed to me fair, that the moment he had announced that when he did not need to announce it he was accepting he was a role model. Mr Moorcroft: It is an interesting philosophical argument. There is almost a contract with the public which we take out. We probably do not do enough in terms of trying to even discuss these issues with younger athletes, and I guess we should do more. I think effectively there is a contract taken out with the public - nowadays it is fairly specific in terms of Lottery and Exchequer funding, but even implicit in people paying money to watch an event. My worry is that, for the vast majority of people who are watching a major football team, they are probably more concerned with whether the player puts the ball in the back of the net than whether they are a nice individual or not. I think maybe going back into schools with an educative process we have to change the ethos of sport in this country. I would share Mark's view, and the vast majority of athletes would share that view, they do have a responsibility - whether it connects with their sexuality or not, I do not know; but certainly in terms of their actual behaviour and the way in which they affect the rest of the public, I think they do have a responsibility. Q217 Michael Fabricant: I have been listening to this with great interest and you have been coming up with some interesting recommendations. Correct me if I am wrong, but you have come up with three recommendations and, not in any order of priority, one is that you would like to see an approved list of supplements, so that everyone knows what supplements, what brand names are safe, what brand names are not so safe; you feel, where public money is given to sports, there is an obligation for those sports to have a consistent methodology for drug testing; and you would like to see an independent tribunal of some sort which is established to actually judge the cases, rather than being the tester, prosecutor, defender and judge all combined. Do you think there is a role for government here, or some other organisation, to actually force this through in sport in the United Kingdom? Mr Moorcroft: I think there is. To regulate the supplements is desperately important. It is very difficult to be absolutely certain if one batch is clear that the next batch will equally be clear. It is difficult to be absolutely definite; but it is not the best regulated industry at the moment. Whether it be the Medicines Control Agency or Trading Standards or whatever, the supplements industry should be better regulated. Ms Jacobs: It is not just a case of whether there are prohibited substances from the point of view of drugs in sport, but the issue about supplements is also to make sure that they are safe from a general health perspective as well. Mr Moorcroft: The issue of consistency we agree with. In terms of the independent agency, you could say there is one - the Sports Disputes Resolution Panel - and it is a beefing-up of that. At the moment each sport can do its own thing. Our belief is that it should be taken away from all publicly funded sports, and effectively we should have a very strong British-type CAS process so that the public, the investors in sport and the competitors know that they will be dealt with consistently; and if there is an adverse finding in athletics, football, tennis or rowing it will be dealt with in exactly the same way. At the moment that does not happen; and that does not happen because it is incumbent upon each sport to deal with it in the way they and their international body thinks it most appropriate. I think those inconsistencies are unfair. Equally, I believe that at the moment there is an inconsistent definition of out-of-competition testing. One of the most effective ways in which you can police sports people is to test them at any time in the world, any place, without notice, and there are only five sports in the UK that do that. That is an absolutely fundamental part of quality and doping control. To give warning, or to not do out-of-competition testing, is to not really take anti-doping seriously. Q218 Chairman: Testing for what? After all, there are large numbers of things which sports people can be tested for. If you are going to do this unexpected, unannounced test, presumably you have some assumption about what they need to be tested for? Mr Moorcroft: There is a very specific list of things that people are tested for, and it is fairly common across all sports. The international body WADA is creating greater international consistency. I believe there are one or two sports where some recreational drugs are treated slightly differently but, effectively, it is the same list for every sport. It already lends itself to consistency, by virtue of that list. It creates major problems for the athletes because it is absolutely incumbent upon them to make sure they do not contravene that list, either deliberately or inadvertently. Certainly from an athletics point of view, because we spent a lot of time asking our athletes, we do unannounced testing, and we do target testing because they want it to be done, because they believe athletics is clean, and they believe if there are some people out there cheating within Britain it is better to find them and live with that pain. Q219 Chairman: Could I ask you a question, which I put last week, namely: when one talks about taking a drug which is performance-enhancing, how do you judge that? For example, not naming any names, there are people active in sport who are diabetic, and they may be on treatment prescribed by their doctor over a number of years, which includes taking a drug possibly daily. If they did not take that drug their performance would be under par, would it not? The question arises: is a drug, prescribed normally as part of a treatment that the person would have even if he or she were not a sports person, something which is set aside, taken for granted and assumed is part of that person's ordinary living pattern? Ms Jacobs: In effect, yes, because what happens is that the individual can pre-register the taking of that drug with the governing body, so if that substance is then found that is already covered and is under a Therapeutic Use Exemption and asthma inhalers are a prime example. Q220 Michael Fabricant: Going back to my earlier line of exploration, what actually are the obstacles to prevent there being a pan-sport arrangement? Is it because the international groups have different criteria by which they would insist that people are tested, and that prevents the UK bodies from cooperating? Is it because maybe some drugs, for some reason or other, might be legal in one sport but illegal (if that is the word to use) in another sport? What actually are the obstacles? Mr Moorcroft: The obstacles are actually being removed. Internationally most nations and almost all governing bodies have signed up to the WADA Code, which is built around the notion of international consistency. It increases the responsibility in Britain to create consistency that currently does not exist. The other issue is, in the past the fact that public money was not being invested to the level it is now in all sports, and in even the wealthiest of sports, meant that those sports could probably quite rightly say, "We'll do our own thing". I think Britain has led the way and there is more good practice in Britain than in many other countries. I think the final piece of the jigsaw is to create the consistency that currently is lacking in this country. I think the excuse of WADA and the notion of public funding gives that reason now. The government have been very robust, correctly, in terms of supporting WADA, and it would be wonderful to have that government endorsement of that independent agency - albeit that the governing bodies (either through means testing, or whatever) should absolutely contribute to the cost of it. It needs that government endorsement, so the public have the confidence that when a decision is made, innocent or guilty, it has that credibility. One of the problems we have suffered from in athletics is an innocent or guilty verdict does not necessarily have the confidence (wrongly) of the media or the public. Even with other sports, very often the verdicts are called into question, through the media understandably; but probably very rarely do they call into question a CAS verdict because it has that credibility. Often it is exactly the same people that would be used in a domestic hearing, but it has that credibility; and at the moment we do not quite have that. Returning to the issue of human rights and the other legal elements - that independent body is best placed also to take into consideration the wider legal implications. Q221 Michael Fabricant: In relation to that independent body, the Sports Disputes Resolution Panel, do you think they would be ideally placed; or would you like to see another formal body being set up to do that sort of work? Mr Moorcroft: I think they provide the basic model - whether that is a beefed-up SDRP, I do not know, others would be better qualified to answer that - but they have been established to begin that process. The view at the moment is that sports could opt in and opt out, and that is one option. Our view would be we would rather make it that publicly funded sports were led down the path of independence. Q222 Michael Fabricant: Is not the danger, if you are only going to include publicly funded sports, presumably you are going to be excluding sports like football? Ms Jacobs: I do not think we are saying that they should be excluded. I think we are saying there should be a compulsory element for people who are publicly funded. Mr Moorcroft: They should be available to all sports - publicly funded or not. Big sports do get funding - it is primarily from money they generate commercially. I cannot think of a big sport in this country that does not get public funding. Q223 Michael Fabricant: You say that Britain leads the way in this - and that is good to hear - but there must be other countries who have similar systems, or maybe better systems than us, as far as compulsorily ensuring that all sports are tested in a regulator uniform way. What sorts of models exist there? Is it always the government that intervenes; or has it been organised between the sports themselves? Ms Jacobs: My understanding is that it is generally government-led. Q224 Michael Fabricant: Does this Government do enough? Mr Moorcroft: I think the Government are saying the right things at the moment, and they are doing more than probably has been done before. Through UK Sport, which effectively is a government agency, I think they have regulated the testing procedures, the education element and contracting with the laboratory and quality assurances. I think all that part via the Government has worked quite well. I think the final part of the jigsaw is a government-backed, government-endorsed disciplinary process when we truly could say that we say and do the right things in this country. I know the principle of arm's-length government is probably one that many people would wish to continue; but I think with this issue it defines the morality of sport in this country and, therefore, the Government need to take a lead on it, and they are saying the right things. Ms Jacobs: I think the introduction of WADA and the harmonisation that is bringing, which Dave talked about earlier, gives the Government the ideal opportunity to go that final step. Q225 Michael Fabricant: Finally, if I could just turn to Mark. I read Mark's article in The Guardian, which was published in October 2003, and I recommend that everyone does read it. I thought it was very moving and, as far as I could tell, was a very accurate portrayal of your experiences. The fact is, you did have Nandrolone, albeit unwittingly. Are there any lessons to be learned, given that there is not such a thing as a kite mark yet, as you suggested, for other sports people to take on board? Mr Richardson: Do not take supplements until we do come up with a definitive safe list. Q226 Michael Fabricant: No supplements at all? Mr Richardson: Until there is some kind of regulatory body. Unfortunately, I did not realise at the time when I was taking the supplements that the supplement industry is completely unlicensed. Some manufacturers are completely a law to themselves. Unfortunately, the manufacturing process is really poor and substandard. Q227 Michael Fabricant: Would that not put British sport at a disadvantage, if the others are taking supplements and we do not? Mr Richardson: It is a quandary; but you take a supplement and you run the risk of failing a test and if you do - strict liability - you have no defence, especially after my case because it flagged up the whole issue and created a much greater awareness of it, and made it a much more high profile situation. Sportsmen and women know now if you fail a test and you say, "I unwittingly took it" that does not count because of strict liability. In the interests of protecting yourself, and making sure that you do not fall foul of the system, then at the moment the strongest and best thing to say is, "Don't take supplements". It is almost Catch 22 - we want our athletes to be the very best they can be; and I had an argument with Linford Christie who said, "Athletes absolutely must take supplements. What they do is unnatural. They are putting their bodies through the mill, and they need to replenish the body with all the vitamins, nutrients and electrolytes they are exhausting through hard training". You do take supplements and you do run the risk of failing a test. My argument was not with UK Sport or with the IAAF, because I trust the science behind the whole thing and realise, "Yes, there was a prohibitive substance found in my body" and as an athlete I am accountable with strict liability. My argument was with the manufacturer of the product in the first place; it was not listed in the ingredients, and the Nandrolone should not have been in there in the first place. I absolutely uphold the law of strict liability, and I do not think it should be reduced or made more lenient in any shape or form; I think that is an unbending rule and needs to stay and is really the cornerstone of our anti-doping policy in this country. Q228 Chris Bryant: Moving on from supplements, because you talked about having some kind of kite mark for supplements and last week we heard evidence to the effect, would it not be a good idea for many other drugs, like Night Nurse and so on, available over the counter that the kite mark should apply to that; are you saying that as well? Mr Richardson: I am not talking about that either. Unfortunately with the economics of the sport, if you are a world champion you can derive a lot of financial benefits from the sport and you are going to get people who cynically cheat. If you were to give a kite mark to something like Night Nurse (and I do not know what the prohibitive substances are in there but there are some which have stimulants and all sorts) you will get some athletes who do wish to cynically cheat, and they will exploit that. I am not saying that some over-the-counter preparations that have been put on the banned list should be accepted. I am not saying that at all. Q229 Chris Bryant: I was not thinking you did mean that. Do you think we should develop a system whereby the pharmaceutical industry has to place on its bottles of Night Nurse either "this contains substances which would be banned if you were taking part in competitive sport" ----- Mr Richardson: I do not think it is a problem with the pharmaceutical industry. Ms Jacobs: In the pharmaceutical industry the substances within the packet are listed and they are accountable for making sure it is that and only that which is in that packet when you buy the Night Nurse. The issue is where you get supplements, where either the substance is not the list, or where the control of the manufacturing process means there is not the repeatability between batches. Whilst there might be no Nandrolone in the first batch, there could be Nandrolone in the second batch, but not in the third, then some in the fourth batch. Q230 Chris Bryant: As I understand an athletic or a sporting career, you start off as an amateur perhaps being driven by your parents in the school run, and you slowly grow into a more important athlete, and there does not become a sudden moment (or maybe there does become a sudden moment) at which you are now somebody who ought to be checking every medicinal product that you take. I wonder whether a kite mark that said "For sports people this would not be a good idea to take" might not be a good idea? Mr Moorcroft: I think it could be a good idea. Many cold cures having something in them called Ephedrine which is banned, and those labels at the moment will say "Ephedrine". We would always encourage athletes to look at the label and if it says something like that then do not take it. It might be useful if there was something on that label that said, "For people taking part in sport be very careful taking this product". As Helen has said, the major issue is not to do with the pharmaceutically controlled stuff when usually the label does say what the ingredients are. There is sometimes a contradiction between what a British product might have it and an American product. As Helen has said, it is the huge dietary supplement industry at the moment that is not the best regulated. Q231 Chris Bryant: You mentioned American and British, one of the other pieces of evidence we were given last week was that quite a lot of people will buy medicines on-line from the United States of America. Is this something you think needs to be tackled Mr Moorcroft: Yes, a big problem. People do say that if you buy it in Britain it is okay, but it is where it is manufactured which is the crucial thing. If there was a better British regulated process then, if athletes did decide to take supplements, you would have to ensure they only bought British products. Even then it is not that easy. Q232 Chris Bryant: You have spoken about no notice, out-of-competition testing being at the heart of making sure that we get this right; but there are only five sports in the UK which do have a full, proper out-of-competition, no notice system. Do you have any comments? Most of rugby does not. Mr Moorcroft: Scottish rugby does. If a person is trying to cheat they will try their level best to cheat. They will not cheat in competition because the chances are they are going to get caught. Very often they cheat during the training period. I lived through the worst of it when I was competing and I think sport, and certainly athletics in the UK, is cleaner now than it has ever been before - I am absolutely certain of that. Part of that is because the out-of-competition testing and education is better now. For a person to know that they could be tested at any time, anywhere in the world, and if need be there will be target testing and doing a combination of urine and blood testing in competition, that is what the athletes want. They want that because they want to be confident that the people they are competing against, and maybe will beat them, as Mark has said, are not cheating. To me, it is desperately important that that is in place. Q233 Chris Bryant: We have had evidence that in some of the cases you get plenty of notice. I do not mean in athletics, but in other sports it is said, "You've got to come for a test tomorrow morning at 11 o'clock", and in the meantime you have had maybe 12 or 24 hours in which, for some substances, you can effectively clean your body out? Mr Moorcroft: Which defeats the object of out-of-competition testing. The principle of out-of-competition testing should be that the person does not know that he or she is going to be tested. We do not do this on the basis we think people cheat; we do it on the basis we think our athletes are clean. One of our failings is we do 700-and-something tests a year and maybe get one or two positives, but understandably the focus is on those positives and not on the 698 that are clean. Q234 Chris Bryant: Just to be clear, what you do is there are 20 athletes taking part in a training session and three or them, or whatever, are told, "You're going to have a test and it's now", and they are escorted from that moment until the test is taken? Ms Jacobs: It could be at home, or it could be at the training session. Q235 Chris Bryant: But that is not what happens in the majority of British sport, is it? It is only five British sports which operate that system. We have got quite a long way to go if we are going to have that level of consistency? Ms Jacobs: Yes. Q236 Chris Bryant: Actually from sport to sport, it is equally important to have that consistency? Mr Moorcroft: I think so, and I think most sports would appreciate that. Notwithstanding the fact that logistically it is a bit of a nightmare - if you are not going to give people notice then, inevitably, it is going to be difficult for the testers to track the people down but we live with that. Q237 Chris Bryant: You spoke earlier about so-called recreational drugs, because for out-of-competition testing quite a lot of sports do not have marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines and narcotics as prohibited substances. Do you think that that should change, bearing in mind that we are talking here about role models in sport? Ms Jacobs: I think there is probably a different emphasis with drugs that are recreational rather than performance-enhancing. It is about the support of those individuals in counselling and all those things, rather than necessarily going through the disciplinary process. Q238 Chris Bryant: I find it difficult to see how any of those drugs could not be performance-altering anyway? Mr Moorcroft: Cocaine is perceived to be a performance enhancer in athletics; whereas others might be perceived to be more of a problem. We would liaise with the international body to agree on how we dealt with that. There have been very, very rare occasions of recreational drugs; but cocaine is on the list of performance enhancers; therefore the normal performance-enhancing sanctions would be appropriate. Q239 Chris Bryant: Anabolic steroids - it seems from some of the evidence we had last week that for many people the starting point of sport is their local leisure centre, the gym, or maybe a privately-run gym, where there are quite a lot of bodybuilders and, in particular, young men aspiring to a bigger body and all that kind of stuff, and there is quite a high percentage of young people who start off using anabolic steroids, so we are told. Do you think we have watched that closely enough? Do you think we do enough work with people when they are training to work in the leisure industry? Ms Jacobs: I think it is important to build a culture in those environments where that is not seen as an appropriate form of behaviour. Q240 Chris Bryant: Do we do enough; or do we not? Ms Jacobs: I think you could always do more. Mr Moorcroft: Directly, UK Athletics does not have a great deal to do with gyms. I think you are right, in terms of the training for gym instructors and working with some of the big corporate gym enterprises, it would be worth it. What we try and do now - and probably Mark is a little bit old for this! - in terms of coach education and the younger athletes we are trying to create an environment where they are excited by the prospect of being as good as they possibly can be without taking drugs; that they see athletics as an exploration of their abilities and limitations. We are trying to create that environment and say that you can be the very best in that environment. They may well go into a different environment which has a different culture. We can only try and control the athlete through coaches and clubs, and once they make the British junior team we are trying to create that environment. I think that is now the prevalent one; but I do not think it was necessarily in athletics 20 or 30 years ago. Q241 Chris Bryant: Finally about coaches, obviously the athlete themselves is the person who most knows what has gone into their body. If you are a very determined and pretty successful athlete you may want to go to the best coach in the world, and it may be that that coach has a stable of people and has a preponderance for using other means of winning; but the coach may end up not being punished at all and it is only the athlete who gets caught. Is that a problem? Mr Moorcroft: Yes, strict liability stops with the athlete. Very often, if there is a positive finding, there is a web of deceit below the athlete. If there was a way in which we could unravel that web that would be wonderful. It is not easy, and maybe the case in the States at the moment will illustrate whether or not that is possible. It becomes incredibly difficult. There are occasions, I am sure, when athletes cheat and their coach does not know about it; but equally I am sure there are occasions when coach, agent, manager and a myriad of people have been part of that deceit. By "athlete" I am using the word generically. We always hate the fact that "athlete" is used to describe sports people, but you know what I mean. Q242 Mr Flook: If you take two athletes, same build, same sport, same competition, same mental determination, and you give one a good diet and the other one a fish and chip, booze diet, what difference in performance would there be? Mr Moorcroft: I came from the fish and chip diet! Seb Coe came from the good diet generation! Q243 Mr Flook: I was going to ask the differential between the newer, younger athlete, Mr Richardson, and the slightly older athlete! Mr Richardson: To be honest, it is very difficult to quantify those kinds of things because everyone has different levels of natural ability. You can get someone who abuses their body and eats all the wrong kinds of things but they have so much latent talent that they defy all odds. Q244 Mr Flook: If they were to then go on to a first-rate legal diet, with all the right carbohydrates, would it make a big difference to their ability? Mr Richardson: You would have to do some kind of scientific experiment. Q245 Mr Flook: And that has not been done? Mr Moorcroft: Nutrition is a big element in terms of preparation. If it makes a one per cent difference, that one per cent is one second in a hundred seconds so in almost all races that is significant. We do it for a number of reasons: one is to minimise body fat, so people are as lean as they possibly can be; also the better nutrients they have, the more likely that will contribute towards them not breaking down as a consequence of training very hard. The analogy nowadays is that an athlete is seen rather like a Formula One car - if you are going to treat a Formula One car with kid gloves and make sure that every element of it you can control is the best possibly, you have to have the same approach for athletes. The quality of nutritional advice is much better than it used to be, and I think it does make a difference but to quantify it is difficult. Ms Jacobs: There is a huge amount of research, but there is also an enormous number of factors. Q246 Mr Flook: Because you have not taken these drugs, what are your observations of those who do, when you have spoken to people who have tested positive, as to how much more of a bang they are looking for, even though they may have been taking all the right legal things and right carbohydrates? In their mind was it a big difference; was it a little difference? If they were taking all the right dietary and legal supplements, did they expect to do that much more or did they think it would unnecessarily have an effect? Mr Moorcroft: The worst elements of drug abuse in my event, endurance, can increase your oxygen carrying ability, and that has a very specific performance enhancement; or, in certain events, increases muscle bulk, and that has a very definite performance enhancement. You are now talking low levels of Nandrolone of a bit of Ephedrine or whatever; this is cynical cheating of the worst kind that has been around for 30 or 40 years and is decreasing. Q247 Mr Flook: Staying with that legal diet, how much do we not know? Are people looking forward and saying, "Well, if we keep doing this we'll keep tweaking the Formula One body to a far greater extent and it'll be worth doing it"? Or do you think we are reaching a ceiling in what we know about how to enhance the body through legal dietary supplements? Mr Richardson: Athlete sportsmen and coaches are always looking for an edge, and science moves so quickly - and I am talking about completely legal and legitimate means - it keeps getting more and more advanced, and it will do. There are new theories coming around. When I was an athlete high protein was the way forward. They were saying a high protein diet was really beneficial to people doing explosive events, but I am sure that has changed now. You get these new fads. Scientific research always supports these new things. You almost go full circle, but there is always an advancement and I think it will continue marching on legitimately. Q248 Mr Flook: In other words, we do not know everything that we could know? Mr Richardson: No, not at the moment. Mr Moorcroft: There are some world records in athletics that are probably beyond reach at the moment, because of probable abuse in the 1970s. Equally, there are athletes - the Paula Radcliffes and the Jonathan Edwards, and we can only speak from a British perspective, and the Colin Jacksons - whom we know have broken barriers and have raised the performance levels legitimately. That gives great hope for sport. Q249 Mr Flook: Moving quickly to the illegal element - is there an arm's race going on between you guys catching them up and those guys keeping ahead? Mr Moorcroft: There will always be cheating in every aspect of life, I am sure. I am sure it is true in everything! Therefore, there will always be people who will deliberately cheat; and there will always be people who will inadvertently take something inappropriately. I think we are winning. I think we are getting closer. It always frustrates me when you hear of a laboratory that is developing a test for human growth hormone that needs X amount more money, that that money cannot be made available. I think sport is incredibly wealthy now - the IAAFs and the IOCs - and there is always a need to invest more and more in terms of research, as long as that is quality research, and investing in more and better testing and doing it not because we think athletes cheat but because they do not cheat and we want to protect them. Q250 Mr Flook: A level playing field? Mr Moorcroft: Yes. It would be naïve to think you could ever get rid of it. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Witnesses: Mr Richard Caborn, Member of Parliament, Minister for Sport and Tourism, and Mr Steven Hodgson, Head of Elite Sports Team, examined Chairman: Good morning, Minister. Thank you very much. Thank you for arriving bright and early too, so that we can get a good start. I will ask Michael Fabricant to open the questions. Q251 Michael Fabricant: Good morning. Our last session may have been early, but it was full of interesting information. Three elements came out of it which tied in as well with evidence we had received over the previous couple of weeks. One was that it was felt desirable if there was some sort of standardisation on supplements. Mark Richardson talked about there being a kite-mark, if you like, so that you knew if you took that supplement it would be drug-free. The second point was the feeling that there should be an independent tribunal which could deal with drugs cases rather than having an organisational that does the testing, advises the defendant but also does the prosecution, which is the sort of arrangement we have at present. The third point that was made was that where sports are receiving public money, and most of them are receiving public money, somebody, and I suggest it might be the Government, should bang heads together to see that there is a consistent scheme whereby all sports in the United Kingdom are tested regularly without advanced warning and at the same time ensuring that there is going to be a belief that in sport in the UK it is drug-free. May I ask the Minister: how do you feel about the idea of banging those heads together? Mr Caborn: I am all for banging heads together, Mr Fabricant, as you well know. I think we have been doing that in sport over this recent past in a number of areas and the least of those. Mr Chairman, Mr Kaufman, can I just lay out broadly where the Government is coming from. I think it would be useful. I think this thing has to be put into some context of where we have come from, where we are and, indeed, where we are going to, and, I must admit, I have found it incredibly intriguing since I have been in this job in the last couple of years or so. If one looks back to when the whole system of anti-doping began I think you go back to the mid-1920 when the IAAF (the International Amateur Athletics Federation) started to look at this very seriously and was the first international sports federation to ban the use of doping. Then, up to the 1970s, a number of international sports federations engaged in that and it became a little clearer. I think the problem was at that time that the anti-doping affairs were broadly restricted to the Council of Europe, and I think it was then into the 1980s when we saw further developments, but, again, it was quite fractious. We got the IOC, we got a number of sports federations and, indeed, individual governments coming together, but unfortunately, because there was no resulting clear definition, policy and sanctions there that we saw the courts had a pretty big aid there, in fact they have taken some of those institutions apart, and it goes to the politics of the global international polity at that stage who were playing a significant role in sport. I think managing the politics of the Cold War has probably been slightly more important than managing the politics of sport and I think, as we knew at that time, sport was being used in the political arenas in a way that it had not before. I think then really credit due to the IOC that in 1999 they then had I think the first major conference on doping in sport, and that was followed very quickly in November 1999 by the setting up of WADA in Lucerne. I think from then on we have been able to start discussing this issue in a very transparent and, I hope, serious way. If I could, Mr Kaufman, put on record my support and indeed congratulations to Jack Rogg and Dick Powell for the efforts they have made in this area through the IOC and through WADA and also the role that the UK Government has played: because I was present at the Moscow conference in December 2002 and it was at that that, I believe, we were at forefront of broking a large part and a significant start in setting up the common principles of inter-governmental cooperation on anti-doping and this was followed in the Copenhagen declaration of March 2003 when we got governments to agree to these basic principles. So we linked in the political clout, I think, to this part of sport. I think the other area that has been of some concern internationally, because some governments incorporate anti-doping issues into domestic legislation: we have taken a different approach to that, indeed, may I say, with many other governments as well, because we view anti-doping not as a criminal matter but as a contractual one for sport itself. Indeed, in order to send a very strong signal to sport, I made it clear at Copenhagen, Mr Chairman, that we said acceptance of the Code by national governing bodies was conditional on public funding. So I think part of the question that you were asking, Mr Fabricant, about how you can use public funding to lever, we use that quite successfully; but we are now moving on again in the continuing refinement of this because my officials are working closely with other governments under the auspices of UNESCO to draft a legally binding agreement to be fully implemented, we hope, by the Turin Winter Olympics. So I think that we now see a continuing development in that, but there are two areas that I think we are very clear on, that is the division of responsibility. The only way that we believe you can eradicate athletes from the use of drugs is to make them totally and utterly responsible for whatever substances go into their body and for sport to manage that problem, and, indeed, that should be done inside sports. It is the misconduct of sport. Can I just, as it were, complete this picture? I think we have been quite successful in the UK. In 2002/3 UK Sport undertook something in excess of 6,000 tests in more than 40 sports, and that came out at 1.21% of those findings, but that was below the 2% global average, and I think that that is credit due to the way that governing bodies have carried this out and, indeed, UK Sport. I just say finally to place this whole in context, while shooting out cheats, and that we are going to do in sport, the vast majority of our sportsmen and women are a credit to the sport and, indeed, in many, many cases an inspiration to the nation. On the question of food supplements, we recognise this is a complex area and indeed possesses significant hazards, but, as I have said, I think that we need now to look at this area of supplements. We have got the clear position of WADA, but it is an area (supplements) on which we need to have further developments. We are, as I said, from 1999 moving this agenda quite quickly, and I know there is a lot more work to be done and I think this area of supplements is one that WADA and, indeed, the national governments and governing bodies need to spend a little more time on. So it is a problem and I think it is something that we need to look at further. Q252 Michael Fabricant: You said, or certainly the Department said in an internal memo to the Select Committee, that there are no mechanisms in place at the moment for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to liaise with the Department of Health regarding supplements. You said this is an area which needs to be got a grip of. Is this something that you will be moving on now rapidly? Mr Caborn: I would hope so. As I have said, I think that throughout the discussions we have had with WADA it is an area, and indeed I have been discussing this with a number of organisations - UK Sport, John Scott and also with the English Institute for Sport - because I think it is important that, whilst we have come off the basic principle, it is the responsibility of the athlete for whatever substance they put into their bodies. Equally so, we have a responsibility to make sure that the education programme, the labelling, and, indeed, we gave as much information as is possible to that athlete to make a sound judgment, and that is a responsibility of all of us in authority whether it be sport or in government or in health, and that is what we will endeavour to do. Q253 Michael Fabricant: So, in effect, you would be producing an approved list by insisting that, just like with pharmaceuticals, the ingredients are clearly labelled? Mr Caborn: Absolutely. I think labelling is crucially important in this area, and, as WADA has got, as you well know, a list of banned substances, then I think in terms of supplements we could be looking in that area as well. Q254 Michael Fabricant: The second point that was raised was the question of consistency in testing across different sports. With some sports in the United Kingdom there is no notice given, someone has to immediately give a sample; in other sports people are given notice that they are going to be tested. Do you agree with the view of UK Athletics, and it is also my view too, that there should be consistency between all sports in the manner in which the testing is given? Mr Caborn: The testing distribution plan on anti-doping - I will read out to you what we are saying on this and then I will give you my interpretation on it: " Q255 Michael Fabricant: I cannot hear a word of this, to be honest with you. Could you either speak up or wait until the bell goes? (Short pause) Mr Caborn: Article 5 on testing is very clearly laid down in the WADA Code, and I think, as it were, paraphrasing the whole lot, the plan is to implement an effective number of in-competition and out of competition testing, but my view is that the deterrent factor upon this is the fact that in the back of the mind of the athlete is that at any time they may well be tested for drugs, and I think that is a very important part of the structure that we have in place. That is the deterrent factor. It has to be transparent, it has to be fair and it has to be consistent, but we will continue to work through that. I think there are some sports that have had difficulty in the recent past. They are reviewing some of those procedures, and that I welcome, and I hope that they are all trying to achieve the common aim, and that is a fair implementation of the WADA Code right across sport. So consistency is important; indeed WADA ask for that consistency and we are working towards that. Q256 Michael Fabricant: I accept your view that this should not be enshrined in legislation - if that is your view, I would not argue with it - but it does seem to me you are taking a rather hands-up approach. You are saying what you would wish to see happen. I am not convinced that you are actively ensuring that it will happen when you say that you want to see a consistent approach across all different sports in the United Kingdom. Could you not be a little bit more proactive? Mr Caborn: I suppose you could be more proactive, but what were the results? I think in our memorandum we sent you over the last 5 years - one of your questions was: what is the position over the last five years, and we have set those out - and, as I said in my opening remarks, I think in terms of the UK we have come third or fourth in terms of the number of tests carried out, slightly just over 6,000. The rate of fines on that is below the international level. I would think that we are fairly consistent across the board and the system is working reasonably well. Q257 Michael Fabricant: That is not the evidence we are getting, you see. I am not saying that we are ridden with drugs. Far from it. What I am saying is that we are inconsistent in the way the regime of drug-testing goes on. It is different in some UK sports from other UK sports, and that is where I am suggesting to you you could be more pro-active to make sure there is fairness. After all, it is unfair to a sportsman, surely, that he should be more rigorously tested in one sport rather than another? Mr Caborn: Yes. First of all, the WADA Code lays down very clearly how the consistency should be developed across sports, and to some extent we are, I think, one would say, in the reasonably early days of the implementation. I think over the last five years the figures you have got since 1999 are fairly consistent and I do not see any major blips in that. That is not to say that we do not keep constant vigil over that, but I think the results that are coming out are showing that it is working, that there is a consistency across that. If we could obviously eradicate drugs altogether, whether they be the performance enhancing drugs or the recreational drugs, and remember we are counting both in the figures, then obviously that is our achievement, but at the moment we are coming well below the international average in terms of fines in the UK, so I think the system is broadly working. Q258 Michael Fabricant: Let us move away from that, because I do not think we are going to agree on that necessarily; but do you see a role for government, perhaps, or at least a role in your department for seeing consistency in the way that hearings are performed? For example, we heard from Mark Richardson before you came how UK Athletics were the people who detected the drug, how they gave him advice and help, which was very welcome, but at the same time they were the prosecutors too; and we have heard last week from the Sports Disputes Resolution Panel and they might be the embryo, if you like, of a separate third-party who could conduct these hearings. Would you like to be a little bit proactive in that direction and ensure that maybe there could be a panel, maybe the SDRP but may be another panel, which could act as an independent tribunal for all sports in the UK? Mr Caborn: That is under active discussion at the moment. I think, first of all, the principle is that WADA is saying there has to be an independent impartial appeals process. Q259 Michael Fabricant: For all sports? Mr Caborn: Yes, and UK Sport at the moment have commissioned a piece of work on that. I think that UK Sport is coming to see you at one your hearings and you may want to pursue that further, but they are now looking at how they can evolve that independent and impartial appeals process. As I say, they have commissioned a piece of work through SDRP and we will wait for that, but I think it is an area, Mr Fabricant, you are right, that further work needs to be done on to make sure it is transparent and consistent and that there is the independence in that, and that is what is being looked at. Q260 Michael Fabricant: Will DCMS pay for such a panel? Mr Caborn: UK Sport is a fully funded NDPB, so in that sense they are the agent of government through the rules of government NDPBs. Q261 Michael Fabricant: So have you ordered, if you like, or given a clear directive to UK Sport that this is an outcome that you would like to see? Mr Caborn: No, I think overall, as you will know, Mr Fabricant, we have been going through a whole modernisation programme on the structure of sport. Part of that modernisation programme has been to look at each of our NDPBs, and we are in the process of re-organising UK Sport. Part of that remit was to look at this whole question of drugs, not just in the appeals but in the round, because there were some criticisms made and that is why we put the whole of the drugs out to third-party examination. That report is now in the public domain and was part of the discussions at the Sports Cabinet in Belfast last week with our colleagues from the devolved administrations as to how we should take these forward, and there was a general agreement about the findings of the report, that we keep it with UK Sport, but there were areas, and this was one of those, where further work ought to be carried out, and that is in fact what is happening. So, broadly, we have accepted the report. We will be keeping the continued running of the anti-doping policy inside UK Sport. Q262 Michael Fabricant: Given that you agree that there ought to be consistency in the way hearings are held, given that you agree that there ought to be clear labelling of supplements, given that you agree that there needs to be an independent tribunal, how are you going to deliver it? You are Minister for Sport. How are you personally going to deliver it? Mr Caborn: I shall see what the recommendations are from the piece of work that has being done by UK Sport and we shall act on them, as we have acted on every other report that has come before us. It is part of the modernisation programme and we will act on those findings and we will come back and let the Committee know, as soon as we can, when we have got the report from UK Sport. Q263 Derek Wyatt: Good morning, Minister. "There was no disciplinary process, no explanation for her removal, no hint about who might replace her." That was said in the Sunday Times about Michelle Veroken, who, even by WADA standards, is probably one of the greatest directors of Drug-free Sport we have ever had in this country or anywhere else in fact. Can you please tell us why she was fired?. Mr Caborn: Well, that is a management issue and we have been going through a whole series of reorganisation through sport, Mr Wyatt. I think you know, the Chief Executive of Sport England left and, indeed, a number of people. That is not to say that those people who have left those jobs are people who were not doing the job that they were employed for, but we are changing, and both in terms of Sport England and UK Sport and the governing bodies, coaching, there has been some radical overhaul of the structures of sport. We put people in to manage change and that is what is happening. It is not, I do not think, for politicians to get involved in those decisions of management. That is for managers to do. I am a politician, not a professional manager. Therefore when we put people in to do a job you look at the outcomes of those and, indeed, we supported what has been done, not just in UK Sport but across the whole structure of sport in the last two, two and a half years. Q264 Derek Wyatt: Minister, we wear a wider hat than just coming in front of a select committee. We have procedures for sacking people. We have early warnings. We have whole things that we believe are correct and proper in the way in which we have employment laws. Is it not fair that somebody who has given 18 years of her life, who is a major cause célèbre in the world that she should be told why she has been fired; and, by the way, why fire the best person? It does not make any sense. There is nothing about modernisation. Mr Caborn: That may be your judgment, Mr Wyatt. It was not the judgment of those people we put in do the modernisation programme. As I say, when you ask people to go in to modernise an organisation, whether it is UK Sport, Sport England, or whatever, you do not put people in and then tell them that they are doing wrong. We had confidence in the people that we put in to modernise that, and that is an employment issue at the end of the day, and, as I think you know, Mr Wyatt, ministers do not get involved in the application of employment law through NDPBs. Q265 Derek Wyatt: Are you saying, therefore, that neither Tessa Jowell nor yourself had any idea that Michelle Veroken was going to get fired that day? Mr Caborn: We were informed of all the moves, that and indeed many others that were done, in the process of reorganising UK Sport. We were fully informed of that on a daily basis and I believe that is the right way for the management to report into the ministerial team. Q266 Derek Wyatt: It seems to me that it should be Sue Campbell who should have been shown the door. I think we have behaved irresponsibly over the position of Michelle Veroken, but let us pass on. In 1988 I helped make a film with Charles Thompson about David Jenkins, who made drugs near San Diego; and in our research we found that the issue was that all of the testosterone and steroid drugs were available in weight-training, and it is weight-training that is bane of our life. There are two questions really. Why can we not make steroids a criminal offence, the possession of steroids a criminal offence? Mr Caborn: I am advised that the supply of steroids is actually a criminal offence, but the possession is not. So there are a lot of grey areas in the law in that area, and again, I think further investigations by WADA and the governing bodies need to take place on this. Q267 Derek Wyatt: But would you see a case for us saying that we would move to make possession---- Mr Caborn: No, I think if we are going to move into the sports area we have to try and move that in concert with what we are trying to do. Since 1999 we have been trying to bring some consistency, in terms of this area of sport, through the wider Code. It is about that consistency and therefore starting to take unilateral action, I think, would not be helpful to moving the international scene forward, which I think is where we are going to get results of having drug-free sport. Q268 Derek Wyatt: So you would rather WADA waited to make a case rather than us take a lead? Mr Caborn: No, we can initiate and, as I said, on supplements we are taking a view on supplements and we are doing a fair amount of work around supplements, but how you then start applying that, I think, is something that we ought to have discussions with WADA. We are moving WADA - as I say, we are in discussions now through UNESCO as well, but in this particular area I think it is not to take unilateral action, I think it is to get all the information and try to take that forward through WADA. Q269 Chairman: Could I intervene on that? It may well be that this is not relevant to your own departmental responsibilities but it is a Department of Health responsibility, but there is a view that these dietary supplements are an absolute scam, that in terms of dietary welfare they are useless though they may have the kind of consequences that are being discussed in sport? Mr Caborn: I think that, Mr Kaufman, is something that we would have to continue to have dialogue with the Department of Health. When we are talking about the WADA Code, we are now looking at a much wider field of applications of steroids and other types of drugs for those who are using it who are outside the high performance that the WADA Code actually affects, and that is a responsibility much more of the Department of Health, but that is not to shirk our responsibility in DCMS, and you may well be right, Mr Kaufman, that there ought to be more liaison between the Department of Health and the DCMS, but we have responsibility for the application of the WADA code and that is for elite athletes. Q270 Chairman: I accept that totally, but the more I read about this, and there has been an extremely interesting very long article in the New Yorker about it a few weeks ago that basically this is a may be multi-billion pound industry now which is based upon deception of the public in relation to deceiving them into believing that these supplements can do things for them which they cannot do, that to a large degree, in terms of health enhancement, they are no better than placebos though they may well have adverse consequences in terms of affecting sporting performance? Mr Caborn: I think it is, and I think that overall responsibility of this country is by the FSA. I think, Mr Kaufman, you touch a wider subject than we are looking at of how you can get this nation much more active. I do not think there are any quick fixes to that. There will be those who want to put all sorts of opportunities and substances to say how you can reduce - I have already seen that on the question of cholesterol. Can you do a quick fix that you do not have to do the exercise: you can eat as much as you want, take a few pills and you have cracked it. I do not think that is going to be the way forward. When I look at some of the statistics and I see a youngster 30 years ago got 70% more physical activity than a youngster today, then it clearly shows that we need to start getting this nation more active. There will be all sorts of substances and products on the market place to show we can have a quick fix, and that is as much in sport as it is, I think, for the health of the nation as well. The responsibility is not with my Department, DCMS, it is with the FSA. Q271 Derek Wyatt: Do you think there could be a role - I am going back to the gyms in both the private and the public sector - for beefing up the trade standards officers and that area to see whether we can attack drugs in that way? I wondered if you had had any conversations there. Mr Caborn: No, we have not. I would say, Mr Wyatt, that the area as far as WADA is concerned is dealing with elite athletes. Broadly speaking, we are not talking about those who are going normally to the gyms. That is an issue, but it is not an issue that has been covered by WADA. There is not a lot of work being done in that area, quite honestly, and, as you know, the growth now in particularly the As, Bs and Cs using the gyms and the fitness centres has increased and is increasing at something round about 20% per annum. It is because of this big debate on the whole question of obesity and healthy lifestyles that people are now turning and looking to see how they can factor in more physical activity in their lives and indeed they are moving into the gyms and fitness. Q272 Derek Wyatt: Mark Richardson gave quite telling evidence this morning and floated an idea about whether there should be a kite-mark on supplements so that athletes would know that nandrolone, or whatever it was, was in that? Do you think it would be good for the Food Standards Agency to be charged with coming forward with the kite-mark concept? Mr Caborn: I think all this is under discussion but it is at a European level. The European Directive (2002/46/EC) on food supplements was adopted in May 2002 and then the Food Supplements (England) Regulations 2003, which implements the European Directive in England, will come into force on 1st August 2005. So the whole question of labelling of food supplements is covered by the European Directives. I think this is an area that is still under some active consideration even though we have got the Directive 46 which has been implemented. Q273 Derek Wyatt: But we lost, I think a bronze medal because of Vick, because he took the American version of Vick not the Scottish version of Vick. So surely it would be the IOC through WADA that would determine the supplement so that you could then have a kite-mark that might have the Olympic rings with a kite-mark with it? Mr Caborn: I think that is something that one could discuss in terms of the labelling through the European Union, and if they believe that they need to take that to the next stage, into the international level, then again that is an area that ought to be explored, but that is not just an issue for the UK, I think that is one movement - if you are going to get that type of consensus at the international level, then we have to move incrementally through Europe into the international arena. Q274 Derek Wyatt: Most of the evidence so far seems to suggest that they would like the testing of drugs to be independent. The only group that seems not to want to be independent is football. We are baffled to understand why it is that most of the other senior sports are happy with being independent but football is not. Can you explain to us why they are so keen to keep it in-house? Mr Caborn: I do not know where that is in terms of in-house. They may want that but in terms of the testing they are signed up to the code and, indeed, UK Sport have got responsibility for that and, indeed, the independent testing goes on. Q275 Derek Wyatt: I am sorry, it is the in-house hearings. I did not explain that very well? Mr Caborn: Sorry. Again, what we have said to the FA, and this is now under review since a particularly high profile case - the FA have now undertaken to do a complete review of the whole of their procedures, and it would probably be useful to wait and see the outcome of that. They have brought third-party people in and Lord Cole has also been advising the FA in terms of the procedures and that is still to come out, so I think there may well be some changes. Q276 Chris Bryant: Can I check, Minister, because you seemed a bit ambiguous earlier, about no notice out of competition testing. Do you believe all sports in the UK should have a full no notice out of competition testing regime? Mr Caborn: Absolutely. I think that one of the more potent weapons that you have in here is that it is random; and no notice should be given. Q277 Chris Bryant: So the fact that only five sports in the UK do have that regime shows that we have got quite a long way to go? Mr Caborn: That is correct. Q278 Chris Bryant: How are we going to get there? Mr Caborn: Because that is the instruction, well, not instruction but in fact the discussion we will have with UK Sport to have that responsibility. It has just been said to me that the WADA Code very clearly stipulates that, and nearly all the governing bodies have now signed up to WADA and, in fact, that is part of signing up to WADA. Q279 Chris Bryant: Out of competition testing in many cases does not include what are termed recreational drugs, prohibited substances, substances that are prohibited under the law like marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines and narcotics, such are morphine. Do you believe there should be a full testing the regime for them as well? Mr Caborn: Again, that is a discussion within WADA. WADA do not demand that. In fact they have said that they will only test for recreational drugs in competition, and that is a view that they have taken, and it is one that we support, because there can be incidents of unfair advantage or indeed danger to other sports people if they were taking recreational drugs in competition. Out of competition, then WADA have said that is not a prerequisite for testing out of competition. Q280 Chris Bryant: But in competition or out of competition for a footballer when they are playing football every week at least once, what is the difference? Mr Caborn: The difference is that if you are taking recreational drugs when you are in competition that can have an effect of making that particular sports person not as responsible as they ought to be when they are in competition. When they are training, out of competition, WADA have taken the view that they do not need to test for recreational drugs. Q281 Chris Bryant: I can see that if you are narrowly looking at the issue of whether this is performance enhancing, but we are also looking at the senior athletes in the wider sense as role models in society in particular for young people, and since they occupy at least 40% of all newspapers and many people start reading the newspapers from the back, not from the front, what footballers, what sports people do and say in their private lives is clearly as fascinating to the media and to Britain as what they do which directly affects their performance on the pitch? Mr Caborn: I think that is true, but again, if one could put that into context, as I said in my opening remarks, of all the tests that we have done in the last year to 2003 over 4000 of those it was 1.2 and - I am just flicking through the figures here - in terms of the recreational drugs that were found it was round about 19, I think it is, out of the whole of that were the recreational drugs. Q282 Chris Bryant: But that is when I am not testing for them? Mr Caborn: That was in competition; but I am putting that into context of the back pages, which you are saying, and we are in danger sometimes of making this.... It is important, it is right that we eradicate cheating out of sport, but, equally, the vast majority of our sportsmen and women do it drug-free and, indeed, are a credit to sport and also an inspiration to many in this nation. You are right, we have to eradicate it, and it may well be if you were doing it for different reasons and it would be for the social responsibility of those athletes, not whether it is performance enhancing - that is what we are trying to find out with the WADA code, then you would be changing somewhat the reasons why you are doing that testing. If it is that these people ought to be more socially responsible and not take recreational drugs and indeed ought to have that tested for those reasons out of competition, that is an argument, but it is not one that is accepted today, but it is an argument that you put, Mr Bryant, and one that could, I think, have some substance. Q283 Chris Bryant: But it might be that the Football Association wanted to maintain its own separate regime because it reckoned that the reputation of football would be harmed dramatically if the real truth were known; in particular if they tried to maintain a notice regime for out of competition testing for so-called recreational drugs, or is that unfair? Mr Caborn: I do not know whether there is any substance to that statement, Mr Kaufman, really. First of all, football has now signed up to WADA. They know the implications of signing up to that. If one wanted to take it further, as Mr Bryant is saying, that you are actually using out competition testing to find out the use of recreational drugs on athletes, that is a case. It is not one that has been accepted today, but it is one that you may well have some.... My official is saying that you can actually test for that, but not for those reasons. Mr Bryant is making a very specific case here in that he is saying that athletes who are privileged to be in the position that they are are role models in society, therefore did not ought to take recreational drugs and they ought to be tested for recreational drugs for that reason, not for performance enhancing. Q284 Chris Bryant: That is the question I am asking really. That is the question I am asking? Mr Caborn: How far do you take the WADA Code to deal with role models in society or against routing out performance enhancing I think is the question that you pose? Q285 Chris Bryant: Yes, and I am posing it to you. Mr Caborn: Yes. It is interesting, but one again has to be careful that you are dealing with a very small percentage of our population which are those who have got the privilege of being elite athletes, who have come under a new regime since the late 1990s to be tested, rightly so, for performance enhancing drugs. If you want to move that into a further area of, say, they have further responsibilities, i.e. role models in society and therefore ought to be tested for performance enhancing drugs, what is the next move, Mr Bryant? Do you say that some of them do not perform, forget performance enhancing drugs, on the question of alcohol? Some of these young sports people get huge amounts of money and can act in irresponsible ways besides taking recreational drugs. At what point do you stop saying that we use these mechanisms that we have specifically for performance enhancing and start using them in other fields? I think you could be moving into dangerous ground, although I accept that there is some validity in your argument. Q286 Chris Bryant: I suppose there is a similar argument, which is that anybody who is a role model in society should therefore be subject to the same testing regime, including politicians and senior captains of industry? Mr Caborn: I do not think WADA would want to come into the House of Commons--- Chairman: These people want to enhance their performance because they are competing with other people in a physical manner. Politicians, although they are competing the whole time, do it in a far more nebulous way. Q287 Chris Bryant: That is certainly true when you are talking about the performance enhancing elements of certain drugs, but if you are talking about so-called recreational drugs which are not performance enhancing, as the Minister.... We can debate this in the Committee! Can I ask a different question, which is about coaches. One of the questions that was raised last week was, of course, the individual athlete is the person who knows what has gone into their body in so far as they have been given all the information and so on, but the coaches play a significant role and quite often will be involved in "the web of deceit" is the phrase that was used earlier this morning. Do you think that there is more that we could do to make sure that we have some redress against coaches who enable athletes to cheat? Mr Caborn: There are sanctions in the WADA code, and I think some of those have been taken in the recent past against coaching and, indeed, administrators in sport; and I do not disagree with what you are saying, Mr Bryant, that probably we do need to revisit this and particularly with the recent incidents we have seen in the US on designer drugs coming in as well that are deliberately out there to help cheats to cover up, and that is unacceptable; but I think there are some basic principles that we would not want to move away from, and that is on the strict liability. I think that once you move away from that you are into all sort of grey areas and difficulties on which, unfortunately, the courts would have an absolute field day. So we are clear that we want to keep it on strict liability that they are responsible. Talking about supplements, it is our responsibility also to make sure on the question of education, on the question of information, and in this particular area, if we believe that people are deliberately encouraging athletes to cheat, then again those sanctions, which are in the WADA Code in the disciplinary areas, can be used; whether they ought to be beefed up somewhat is now a question that ought to be going in front of WADA again, particularly from what we have seen in the US in the recent past. Q288 Alan Keen: First of all, can I just touch on the supplements, not in relation to improving performance, but, I think your Department has a responsibility for part of the healthy living encouragement of people. Most of the supplements, as the Chairman said, are valueless because the same vitamins can be received from a normal healthy diet. Do you agree that you have got some responsibility? Encouraging people to take part in sport is expensive? Should we not let them to know that they do not have to waste their money on useless tablets? Mr Caborn: Yes, it would be helpful in that field. Obviously the answer to that, Mr Keen, would be yes, but again when we are talking about the WADA Code we have to be clear what the WADA Code is doing. It is talking about the performance of athletes; it is not talking about you and I playing for the House of Commons football team or something like that. We are not talking about that type of thing, but you are right, there is an area that needs to be investigated, some of it has been, I think, in Canada on supplements, but it is an area that has not had a lot of research done into it to be quite honest. I think labelling is important, and that is why we are keen to continue the dialogue at the European level to make sure that labelling does take place - the point that Mr Wyatt was making - and, indeed, kite-marks is an interesting thought as well, but you cannot do it in isolation, just the UK doing that. You either do it at the European level or, indeed, at the international level, and I think more work needs to be done on the whole question of supplements anyway. Q289 Alan Keen: Most, and I think rightly so, sporting bodies are an arm's length from DCMS and I think it would be ludicrous for you to try and run some of those sports, but there are some issues where I would have thought that DCMS had a direct responsibility to pull things together, and drugs is one, is it not? Do you feel that you have a responsibility also for sports people as role models? I am not talking about sports people taking drugs, I am talking about behaviour. Do you feel you have some responsibility? Mr Caborn: Yes. We do have some responsibility there. I think, as you know, Mr Keen, at the moment on the whole question of sport development we are trying to drive up participation in sport. There is no doubt it is all about policies and the restructuring of sport and governing bodies, cultures, what we are doing in schools, is to drive up participation in sport. We acknowledge that if we do that we will only be reaching somewhere round about 9% or 10% of the physical activity of the nation, so another 90% are in other areas, and that is under active discussion across government through the Activities Coordinating Team (ACT) and where we have a whole series of strands of work that we are doing in trying to look at how we can get the nation more active., and in that area it may well be that we do look at this area of food supplements because people can be misled by some of the advertising that is taking place on some of the supplements, what they can do for the body, what they are doing in terms of the activity and the well-being of a person. I think it may be that we have to look at this through the Activities Coordinating Team which does coordinate across nine departments of state. Obviously it is co-chaired with Billy Johnson and myself, Department of Health and DCMS. Q290 Alan Keen: I have played football and cricket with you and I know what a wonderful role model you are! Mr Caborn: I am doing the half-marathon on Sunday and I am hoping all these journalists will be supporting me! Q291 Alan Keen: Both of us are able to use, you know, off views in answer when the referee criticises us for a late tackle! I am using this inquiry, I am extending it slightly for role models to be not just talking about athletes taking drugs, but role models, athletes and sports people as role models for kids. We have seen some particularly bad behaviour on the football field in the professional game over the last 12 months or so, and before that, of course. You could almost put a new event in the Olympics, one for diving in the water, one just diving. We have got some experts. Do you think you have got a role in encouraging professional football to improve their act? Mr Caborn: Very much so. You are absolutely right, Mr Keen, when I go round the country and talk to a lot of teachers, they say what happens on the football field on a Saturday afternoon is replicated in the playground on Monday morning, and some of it is not very desirable as far as sport is concerned. I did, the season before last, write to the Chairmen of all the professional football teams asking them to at least raise this issue, and I was doing it from the background of what teachers were telling me of how their pupils were reacting in response to what they had seen in the professional game. I do know the FA take this very seriously. As I say, I did write to all the Chairmen of the professional footballs clubs asking to raise it both with the manager and the players: because I do think they are role models. There is no doubt about that. What we are doing probably a little away from football, is looking at UK Sport and Sport England working together on Sporting Champions, and that is encouraging our athletes to take a very proactive role in the community; and in 2003 they actually, through the Sporting Champions, reached some 83,000 children. I can tell you also that as we are looking at how we fund elite athletes post Athens and Beijing, because that is the period that we are looking at at the moment, that part of that agreement for world class performance will be an agreement that these athletes who are receiving, in some cases, quite substantial sums of money on world class performance will be putting some of that back in by joining the Sporting Champions Scheme in a much more organised and managed way. I think to some extent a lot of our athletes would do that. I do not think they have had the opportunity, because we have not had a system in place, to do it in an effective way, but it will be part of the new financial agreement post Athens and up to Beijing. As I say, the vast majority of our athletes are delighted to go in and work with young people. They are a great inspiration. If you ever get the opportunity to go and meet some of our Olympic champions going round and speaking, they are absolutely in awe of these people and they are quite significant ones. Q292 Alan Keen: Have you had a response back from the FA yet? Mr Caborn: No. As I said to the Chairman, I wrote specifically to the FA and I got some very good responses. I cannot remember which ones they were at the moment, but if you want I will let you have that information. Many of the chairmen of the football clubs said that they would want players to act more responsibly on the park and they did take on board the point that they were obviously influential in their communities and they were role models. Again, I think Mr Keen, that the vast majority of players do take that responsibility seriously. Unfortunately, sometimes when there is a misdemeanour committed it gets blown out of all proportion on the back pages. Alan Keen: Sometimes it does, sometimes we just see it with our own eyes on the telly. Anyway, the FA are coming next week and we will ask them then. Q293 Charles Hendry: Minister, listening to some of your replies I get a sense that you are not really in the driving seat in this and that you are being reactive rather than proactive. You talk in terms of banning steroids and saying that it is something you need to discuss with the Home Office as if it is an issue that you have not thought of before. In terms of your attitude to supplements you talk about the need to wait and see what the UK Sport report says before you decide what action you are going to take. Do you see your role to be a leadership role on this and to be proactive or do you see it as appropriate and sufficient just to react to what others are doing? Mr Caborn: I can assure you that we have been taking a very, very proactive role, and indeed we were congratulated by the Chairman of WADA, Dick Powell, in Copenhagen on the way UK Sport, my officials and indeed the ministerial team have helped WADA to achieve what it did by getting political agreement to the WADA Code in a way that many did not expect would happen. We worked very hard in Moscow and we worked very hard in Copenhagen and indeed in other international fora around the world because we believe that what WADA is doing is absolutely right, so I can assure you that we are 100 per cent behind WADA and, as I have said, we have been acknowledged for that. If you are now talking about how do we take it further, and remember we have come a very long way in a relatively short period of time, we are talking a few years and this has been a problem that we have had for decades which has not been able to be resolved, probably because of some of the political structures we have had internationally, we are working in that area and we are very, very clear that there is further work to be done in terms of supplements. However, we are talking specifically - and this is what I understand Chairman, this inquiry is about - the operation of WADA, and that is what I have been instructed all your questions were around and that is what we have tried to make sure we have answered and answered fully. There are some problems, there is no doubt about that, in sport and beyond that need to be addressed, but that is not necessarily a role just for the DCMS, it is a role for wider government and, as I said, we are taking that up through labelling, through the FSA, through the Department of Health and also working continuously through UK Sport to make sure we refine and, I hope, inform the decisions of WADA and other international for a in the future. Q294 Charles Hendry: That is a very helpful clarification but when we were in Greece recently we were told by one of the people who had been involved in putting forward the Athens Olympic bid that they felt that what the IOU would be looking for from whichever country they gave the 2012 Games to was for that country to have shown a very strong lead on anti-drugs measures and they though it was an absolutely fundamental and crucial issue. Do you feel that you have done enough in this country to satisfy the IOC? Mr Caborn: Of course. I do not think there is any doubt about that. The system we had in for the Commonwealth Games in Manchester was again well-acknowledged by all the sporting bodies, including the Commonwealth and the IOC, and when we ran Birmingham and the IWAF Indoor Championships, again it was commended for the way we had acted as the agent for the IWAF in detecting drugs, so I think that we have probably got as good a system and perhaps second to none anywhere in the world, and I have absolute confidence in the system and structures that we have put in place. Q295 Charles Hendry: Some of our witnesses last week in terms of the best anti-doping systems in the world mentioned the States, Canada and Australia. Are there things which we can learn from those in terms of structure and in terms of the approaches which they are taking? Mr Caborn: You can. As I say, one of the issues is about do you put the whole question of anti-doping into criminal law or do you keep it, as we have done, in this country and indeed many other countries? It is really how you can marry these together and that is what the discussions at UNESCO are about at the moment. Yes, we can learn and I think that we have. I think they have also learned quite a lot from us as well. So it is how we can get into the sporting fraternity a consistent approach to this. All of us have got the end objective and that is to drive cheating out of sport. So it is in the interests of all of us to work together and I think the forum that the IOC has created through WADA gives us that international forum. What we have been able to bring to the party in recent years is to give that political clout behind it, even though there are slightly different systems operating in each of the countries and how they apply it under their various mechanisms of law. Chairman: Thank you very much, Charles, and thank you very much, Minister and Mr Hodgson, we are very grateful to you. |