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| Feature | No.64 June 2013 |

Personal Experiences in International Sports Law

Lauri Tarasti

A.Introduction

My career in international sports law began at the first World Athletics Championships held in Helsinki in 1983. In my capacity as Secretary-General of the Organising Committee, I befriended Primo Nebiolo, the legendary Italian President of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF). I also came to know personally all members of the Board of the IAAF, including Carl-Olaf Homén, the President of the Organising Committee of the World Championships. As a result, I was invited to become the first chairman of the IAAF Arbitration Panel. The Panel was founded in 1984, based on a decision made two years earlier.

The IAAF Arbitration Panel was the first internal arbitration court in international sports; the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) was founded two years later. IAAF was ahead of all other international sports federations in doping control in the 1980s and 1990s, and during its early years, CAS based many of its decisions and interpretations on those of the IAAF Arbitration Panel. It was not until 2001 that IAAF decided to abolish the Arbitration Panel due to insufficiencies relating to its independence and start to refer cases to CAS.

The Arbitration Panel consisted at first of six, later of nine members, who elected the chairperson from their midst for a two-year term. I was elected seven times and served as chairman from 1984 to 1997 and still as an ordinary member until 1999. My successor as chairman was Professor Christoph Vedder from Munich.

In the Arbitration Panel, as in CAS, each case was heard by three judges. The difference was that in the Arbitration Panel the chairman – myself from 1984 to 1997 – sat in on all of the cases. This principle was adopted in order to maintain consistency in the Panel’s decisions, which has often been a problem in CAS with its rotating panels of judges. This was possible in IAAF because the number of cases was relatively small.

During my term in office, the Arbitration Panel heard a total of 15 cases: only three between 1985 and 1992 and subsequently two cases in a year by average. They were all high profile cases, though. The first one concerned amateur rights and all the other 14 were doping offenses.

Oral hearings took place at the IAAF office, which was located in London at the time and later transferred to Monaco. The athlete was usually present, accompanied by his or her attorney and witnesses. The IAAF was also represented by attorneys. One who particularly comes to mind is Mr Michael Beloff, the sharp-minded English lawyer who has become one of the foremost names in international sports law.
Sometimes oral hearings led to dramatic situations. In most cases the decision of the Panel was proclaimed on the day that followed the hearing in the presence of the concerned parties, i.e. IAAF, the athlete and the relevant national sport federation. Often the athlete burst to tears when the decision went against him or her. A tight schedule like this was possible because the Panel usually heard the case between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. and then adjourned for dinner. The Panel members reached the decision in free discussion over dinner and then put it in writing during the night. This was hard work that usually lasted until long after midnight. In the last cases during my chairmanship, the procedure had to be changed: the decision of the Panel was henceforth delivered in written form two weeks after the oral hearing.

According to the rules of the Arbitration Panel, oral hearings could be dispensed with and the decision based solely on written procedure in a doping case if the athlete so wished. One of the 15 cases during my chairmanship was resolved in this manner. The Panel also had to dismiss one case because the claim arrived too late.

The IAAF used the best sports physicians of the time as its witnesses in doping cases. This way, I came to know Arne Ljungqvist from Sweden, who at that time chaired the IAAF Medical Commission and who even today, aged well over 80, serves as Vice President of the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA), as well as the late Manfred Donike from Germany, who developed the test methods for detection of anabolic steroids in the 1970s. I was one of the speakers at the seminar held in his memory in Cologne in 1995. I also met the heads of the laboratories that were most frequently used by the IAAF: Professors Ayatte (Montreal), Cowan (London) and Schäntzer (Cologne).

B. Cases

The first case in which I sat as chairman in 1985 concerned an appeal by the American 110-meter hurdlers Renaldo Nehemiah and Willie Gault to be reinstated as amateurs. Their amateur rights had been revoked when they had started to play American football as professionals. The Arbitration Panel’s decision was in their favor, but it did not have much bearing because at about the same time, IAAF abolished all amateur restrictions from its rules and its Board accepted the athletes’ appeal. I still remember the cultivated appearance of the champion runner and world record holder Renaldo Nehemiah at the Panel hearing.

In doping cases, the decisions of the IAAF Arbitration Panel were often used as precedents in later cases, also by the CAS. In the cases of Sandra Gasser (1988) and Butch Reynolds (1990) the Panel decided that the minor flaws that had occurred in doping control procedures did not render the test result null and void, as they had not caused serious doubt as to the reliability of the test. In other respects, the Reynolds Case was a normal doping case. I remember well that after Reynolds had left the hearing and the door was closed I asked the other Panel members: “Guilty or not guilty?” The East German lawyer, who was a former Olympic medallist in women’s discus, immediately replied, “Guilty”.
Reynolds later filed a suit against the IAAF in a court in his home state Ohio. The case was heard by an 81-year-old judge who had hardly any knowledge of doping affairs, but in the United States judges do not have a mandatory retirement age. The court annulled Reynolds’s two-year suspension that had been confirmed by the Arbitration Panel and awarded him USD$27.3 million in damages! The IAAF challenged the verdict in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The federal court overturned the verdict on the ground that the Ohio court had had no jurisdiction in the case: the suit should have been filed in a court in the legal domicile of the IAAF, which was London at that time. Reynolds lost his case in entirety but he returned to the running tracks after serving his two-year ban.

The case of the Nigerian female hurdler Ime Akpan (1995) was the only one of the 14 doping cases heard during my chairmanship where the Panel decided that medical evidence was inconclusive: hormones contained in birth control pills could not be unequivocally distinguished from anabolic steroids. I made my opinion after studying Akpan’s results statistics that had been provided to me by IAAF General-Secretary István Gyulay. The results showed that her improvement had been quite steady. Akpan was acquitted of charges.

In the case of the Italian high jumper Antonella Bevilacqua (1996), the Panel decided that her ban could not be repealed on the grounds that she had taken health pills without knowing that they contained banned substances. The athlete must check the contents of any pills he or she takes that are not part of everyday nourishment. This interpretation was later confirmed in the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC).

The Arbitration Panel did not believe the claim of the Australian sprinter Dean Capobianco (1997) that his positive doping test was caused by beef containing growth hormone in an aeroplane meal. Capobianco’s witness was a Dutch doctor who explained that eating meat of hormone-grown cattle could result in a positive test result, but the IAAF called an expert from the Agricultural Department of the European Union, who testified that the odds for that were one in a million. In its decision, the Panel upheld the athlete’s strict liability.

The case of the American sprinter Dennis Mitchell (1999) did not lack ironic features. He had been caught for excessive testosterone while serving as chairman of the association of American drug-free athletes. Mitchell claimed that his high testosterone level had been caused by nutritional supplements, drinking 6–8 beers and having sex in the previous night as well as not having urinated for 13 hours before the test! The Panel did not believe his explanations and suspended him for two years.

The most famous cases heard by the Arbitration Panel were probably the two that involved Katrin Krabbe and two other East German sprinters, in the first case (1992) Grit Breuer and Silke Möller, in the second (1993) Grit Breuer and Manuela Derr. Katrin Krabbe was the most famous female track and field athlete of the time and the poster girl of East German elite sport.

The first Krabbe case was quite special. The three sprinters had undergone a surprise doping test during their training camp in South Africa. The samples were analysed in a laboratory in Germany and found to be negative. But they were also found to contain urine of one and the same woman: the test had obviously been manipulated. The Arbitration Panel heard several witnesses including the doctor under whose surveillance the tests had been conducted. The Panel could not find a guilty party or establish that any offense had been committed against the IAAF rules or doping control procedures. The athletes were thus acquitted.

Later, an almost similar case was brought to the CAS. In this Boevski case (CAS 2004/A/607) three Bulgarian weightlifters had delivered negative doping samples that contained urine of a single person. The CAS Panel could not find a guilty party or any direct evidence of sabotage. However, it declared having reached comfortable satisfaction that the athletes had indeed carried out or acquiesced to manipulation. Their suspensions were thus confirmed.

I still believe that in a strictly juridical sense – if not in a supervisory sense – our decision in the Krabbe case was better grounded than that of the CAS in the Boevski case. In doping codes, strict liability applies only to positive samples. In both of these cases, the samples were negative, which means that the athletes’ guilt must be proven in a normal way, not by using the strict liability -principle. Also, convicting all three athletes without determining which of them are guilty amounts to collective punishment.

The first Krabbe case had an epilogue. Six months afterwards, an envelope was dropped into my mailbox. It contained the latest issue of Der Spiegel, carrying a three-page article on how doping control officials have been fooled, also in the Krabbe case. Doctors’ testimonies and illustrative drawings were applied to show how a small plastic bag containing pure urine is inserted into a woman’s vagina. A small scratch with a nail is enough to burst the bag and release the urine into the test tube. We may remember that nearly a same kind of urine bag was later used by the Hungarian male throwers Annus and Fazekas at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004.

The second Krabbe case concerned Clenbuterol, which at that time was not listed among banned doping substances but among comparable performance-enhancing substances. Consequently, Katrin Krabbe and Grit Breuer had been banned for one year and Manuela Derr for 8 months for unsportsmanlike behavior, not for direct doping offenses. The IAAF Board had prolonged their suspension to three years. The Arbitration Panel examined only whether this prolongation had been made according to the IAAF rules and found that it had indeed been so. Afterwards ,Krabbe filed a suit in Germany against the IAAF, claiming for revocation of her suspension and damages. The result of the long process that followed was that while the original one-year suspension was upheld, the IAAF’s three-year prolongation was found to have infringed the athlete’s right of practicing her profession. Quite exceptionally, the IAAF was ordered to pay damages to Krabbe. The exact amount was later settled by mutual agreement.

C. Writing down history

When I withdrew from the IAAF Arbitration Panel in 1999, I decided to write a book on the 15 cases that were heard during my chairmanship. I considered it necessary to explain the Panel’s decisions and thus pave the way for future practice of sports law. The book was published by the Monaco-based International Athletics Foundation, which had been founded by Primo Nebiolo mainly with the proceedings of the World Athletics Championships. I wrote the book in English with the help of Robert Stinson, then the treasurer of the IAAF who is a lawyer himself. The book, titled Legal Solutions in International Doping Cases, was published in Milan in the year 2000.

The history of the IAAF Arbitration Panel has also been discussed by my successor as chairman, Professor Christoph Vedder in his article The Heritage of Two Decades of Arbitration in Doping-Related Disputes (The International Sports Law Journal 3–4/2005).

All in all, the IAAF Arbitration Panel was an important step in the development of international sports law.

2. WADA

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was founded in 1999 in Lausanne in a major international conference convened by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), of which I was a participant. In the following year, I was elected to the Juridical Committee of WADA. The committee usually convened twice a year in Lausanne, but meetings were also held in Colorado Springs, Singapore and Montreal, where our host was Harri Syväsalmi, the Finnish Secretary-General of WADA at the time. He had had a Finnish sauna built in the WADA headquarters in Montreal – something which all his colleagues did not fully appreciate.

I should perhaps mention that in 2001 I was invited to oversee the election of the host city of WADA headquarters at the WADA Foundation Board meeting in Tallinn, Estonia. There were five candidate cities, one of which was eliminated after each round of voting. The two cities left in the final round were Lausanne and Montreal. To my great surprise Montreal won, possibly because many wanted to keep WADA separate from the IOC, which is based in Lausanne.

The Juridical Committee handled juridical questions that related to the founding of WADA. WADA is a foundation, a private legal entity registered in Switzerland, even if seats in its administrative organs and responsibility of funding are evenly shared between international sports organisations and governments. The most important task of the Juridical Committee was the preparation of the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC). Previous anti-doping regulations of the IOC and IAAF served as guidelines in this work, in which I was also able to contribute. Some of my suggestions were adopted into the WADC. I laid particular emphasis on the principle of strict liability. WADC was a major achievement in anti-doping work. It was adopted in 2002 and entered into force on 1 January 2003.

The Juridical Committee of WADA was chaired by the New Zealand lawyer David Howman. When in 2003 he was elected Secretary-General of WADA, in succession to Harri Syväsalmi, he unexpectedly abolished the Juridical Committee and began to use attorneys as legal experts. One of them was my good friend Richard Young from Colorado Springs. One of my most memorable associates in the WADA Juridical Committee was the Singaporean lawyer Loh Lin Kok, who had also been my colleague in the IAAF Arbitration Panel.

My work at WADA came thus to an end. However, I was able to present my comments on the second version of the WADC, which entered into force on 1 January 2009, through the statement given by the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education (ICSSPE) (see below) and quite recently also on the third, 2013 version (effective from 1 January 2015) through the IOC Sport and Law Commission.

I was able to use my expertise on the first, 2003 version of the WADC into good use when I wrote single-handedly the anti-doping regulations of the World Squash Federation (WSF) in 2003. This task fell upon me naturally, as I was the only lawyer member of the Medical Commission of WSF at that time (2001–2008).

3. IAAF Juridical Commision

A. General

The IAAF founded its own Juridical Commission as late as 2001. This was quite surprising, given the fact that judicialisation of sport had already extensively developed by that time.

As I had given up my work at the IAAF Arbitration Panel a few years earlier but still represented the IAAF in the IOC Sport and Law Commission, I was invited to become the first chairman of the IAAF Juridical Commission. One day before its inaugural session, I sought an audience with the new IAAF President Lamine Diack of Senegal, who had just been elected to succeed the deceased Primo Nebiolo. I had met him for the first time at the IAAF congress in Rome in 1981 but I doubted that he would recognize me any more. When the door of the conference room opened and Lamine Diack walked out, he saw me and said: “Dear Lauri, welcome to the IAAF.” After that I was welcomed to Monaco more than 20 times.

The Juridical Commission turned out to be very useful and the IAAF Secretary-General (at first the Hungarian István Gyulai, later the Frenchman Pierre Weiss) usually attended its sessions himself. The IAAF’s skillful attorney, Englishman Huw Roberts, served as the ex-officio secretary of the Commission. Further proof of the Commission’s importance was that Bob Hersh (from the USA) wanted to continue as a member when he was elected IAAF Vice-President.

The Commission usually held two sessions per year. As its chairman I also attended IAAF Board meetings when legal matters were discussed. Each year I also received an invitation to the IAAF Gala, which is held in Monaco every November with 700–800 athletics personalities in attendance.

In the beginning, the Juridical Commission consisted of a chairman and five members. The number later rose to seven when it was decreed that every IAAF Commission must have at least two female members (in like manner the Women’s Committee would include at least two men). Our female members (Maria Clark from New Zealand and Anne Jakob-Milicia from Germany) turned out to be efficient lawyers and eager debaters – and consequently our sessions tended to become even longer than before.

B. Jurisprudence in the Commission

While serving in the IAAF Juridical Commission I learned to fully appreciate how wide a difference still exists in the legal systems of common law and civil law countries. The Commission was entrusted with the task of preparing a general reform of IAAF rules concerning athletes’ representatives (agents). The responsibility was given to Jack Agrios of Canada, who had been a distinguished member of the Commission since the beginning and who in 2011 followed me as its chairman, and to Habib Cissé of Senegal, who has also served as adviser to President Diack. They took the rules of the National Hockey League (NHL) of North America as their model. What followed was a 20-page template of a contract between athlete and his agent and a 20-page application form for agents’ licensing examination. In a civil law legal system, five pages would have been a lot.

Another thing that I found myself wondering was not much weight being given to privacy: prospective agents had to disclose their social problems, possible crimes and misdemeanors, as well as their bank account and property information in the application form.

In the United States, contracts have to be written in extreme detail, because violations can lead to punitive damages that may exceed the suffered loss tenfold. A good example is the above-mentioned ruling of the Ohio judge, ordering the IAAF to pay USD$27.3 million to Butch Reynolds. As we have seen, that sum was pulled out of a hat.

According to the IAAF regulations, all athletes who placed among the top 30 in their respective events in the previous season must employ a licensed representative. The combined number of men’s and women’s events in track and field athletics is over 40, which means that the total number of athletes represented by agents is about 1,000.

The Juridical Commission concentrated almost exclusively on rules questions: the IAAF Charter, competition rules, anti-doping rules, ethical rules, advertising rules, rules concerning agents etc – a good example of judification of sports, a trend which I vainly have tried to resist.

Athletes’ representation rules were discussed extensively during many years and underwent several changes. Sports nationality does not necessarily concur with citizenship. Some Arab countries in particular have started to “purchase” athletes from Africa, mainly from Kenya, even if the Kenyan Athletic Association has tried to stem the tide. Athletes can be given a new citizenship in a few weeks, sometimes even a new name, which makes their identification difficult.

Athletes who have taken part in international competitions for one country may represent another country only after serving a three-year quarantine. This may be shortened to one year by mutual agreement of the two national associations. These agreements usually involve money, even if athletics does not have a formal system of transfer fees like soccer does. The IAAF Board also has a right to lift the quarantine entirely when necessary.

Young athletes who have not yet taken part in international competitions fall outside the quarantine system and have indeed been subjected to recruitment in African countries. No good solution to this question seems to be available.

The Congress and Board of the IAAF often demanded stricter sanctions against doping offenders. The Juridical Commission could not comply, because the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC) gives hardly any leeway to individual sports federations. Even the IOC was taught a lesson, when CAS gave its decision on the rule in the Olympic Charter that banned athletes who had received a doping-related suspension of at least six months from competing at the next Olympic Games. The ban was declared inconsistent with the WADC and also in contradiction with the ne bis in idem principle, i.e. no two punishments for the same offense.

The Commission also discussed the possibility of sentencing doping offenders to pay corollary monetary fines, allowed by the WADC for international sport federations under exceptional circumstances. I was not very excited about that, especially for athletes in whose countries doping offenses were punishable in criminal courts. Criminal sanctions and sport-internal disciplinary sanctions are different kinds of sanctions, but from the athlete’s point of view they amount to two punishments resulting from one and the same offense.

It is however possible to include penalty clauses for doping offenses into contracts between athletes and national associations or between athletes and sponsors, as has indeed quite often happened. In these cases, doping offenses can lead to three different sanctions: 1. criminal court punishment – usually a fine, sometimes even prison sentence; 2. suspension and loss of prize money by sports-internal arbitration panel; 3. contractual penalty fine, which may amount to a considerable sum. That would indeed be punishment enough.

The Commission handled ethical questions all through my term. The IAAF adopted a Code of Ethics in 2002 but it remained largely a dead letter, as no ethical commission was appointed to supervise its implementation. If such a commission had been given punitive powers as required by the Code of Ethics, it would have necessitated quite an amount of legal work on rules of procedure, rights of appeal etc., not to mention additional administrative costs.

Sports betting was a new ethical area that came under discussion. A general provision was added into the IAAF rules prohibiting athletes, officials and all accredited persons involved in a competition from betting on the results of that particular competition. However, the provision does not elaborate on how and by what rights betting is to be investigated and what sanctions will ensue. Ethical rules of the IAAF still need to undergo a general reform in this regard.

The International Olympic Committee is putting pressure on sports federations to adopt more stringent methods against sports betting. The IOC has demanded that all international federations in Olympic sports adopt rules that prohibit and sanction against sports betting. Illegal betting has indeed become a second major problem in world sport, alongside doping. This concerns soccer in particular, where the amount of money involved is by far the largest. The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has also voiced its concern over sports betting. I participated in the preparations of the 5th International Conference of Ministers and Senior Officials Responsible for Physical Education and Sport (MINEPS V), held in May 2013, in the sub-commission “Preserving the Integrity of Sport.”

The transfer of prerogatives that generally belong to public authorities to private law entities, such as sports associations, in questions of sports betting control, remains a thorny juridical problem.

4. IOC Sport and Law Commission

In 1996, while I was still serving as chairman of the IAAF Arbitration Panel, the IAAF Secretary-General István Gyulay asked for permission to put my name forward for the new Sport and Law Commission of the International Olympic Committee. As the Commission would only hold one session in a year, I was glad to accept. So far there have been 16 such sessions: I am currently the only member of the Commission to have served since the beginning.

The members of the IOC Sport and Law Commission are appointed by the IOC President for one year at a time. At first the Commission was chaired by Kéba Mbaye of Senegal, who also served as the first President of CAS, later by Thomas Bach of Germany, who is currently IOC Vice-President and at the time of writing a leading candidate for the presidency when Jacques Rogge retires later this year.

The current situation in the IOC is a bit strange, as there are actually two juridical commissions: the Juridical Commission and the Sport and Law Commission. Both have Thomas Bach as chairman and the Englishman Howard Stupp, Director of Legal Affairs at the IOC, as secretary. The members come from different continents and represent different sports.

The Juridical Commission handles practical juridical questions such as contracts, the Sport and Law Commission, where I serve, principal questions of sport law. I have suggested to Thomas Bach that the two commissions be united. This has not happened so far, but this year our session was held jointly with the Juridical Commission for the first time.

The sessions of the Sport and Law Commission in Lausanne have usually been preceded by a joint dinner in the previous evening. IOC President Jacques Rogge has attended our dinner twice. The session itself has usually lasted from 9 am until 3 pm, and has sometimes called for special arrangements. Our American member Anita L. DeFrantz has often attended by telephone and has thus been awake at home from 2am until 8 am. A Spanish-language interpreter had to be provided for our previous Argentine member, who did not understand English.

The Commission has discussed many subjects over the years, such as the status of National Olympic Committees, the concept of Olympic athletes, Youth Olympic Games, Olympic Congresses, sports betting, internet page names, citizenship rights, independence of the Olympic Movement etc. Doping cases detected at the Olympic Games have been discussed at every session, as have the IOC’s own anti-doping rules for every particular Olympic Games.

The 2013 session of the Sport and Law Commission prepared a statement on the third version of the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC). I found myself wondering that I was the only member who noticed the second most important point in the WADC reform. Without doubt, the most important point is the projected raising of the general two-year doping suspension to four years. The second most important point, which was mentioned only twice in the draft text, is that the comments of the code are also to be considered mandatory and binding, ergo norms. This would double the number of doping norms and would lead to total confusion of juridical terms.

Immaterial rights of the IOC have also been under discussion in the Sport and Law Commission. The Olympic rings and the world “Olympic” are protected by law in some countries, but mostly as trademarks. Olympic mascots and name-and-year combinations of Olympic host cities have also enjoyed protection. The IOC has been most vigilant in guarding these rights, as we have latest seen in connection with the London Games. The purpose is to protect the rights bought by the sponsors of the Olympic Games. Legal protection of the word “Olympic” has proven a difficult task, however.

In order to sell its most valuable asset, television rights, the IOC needs to protect its audio-visual monopoly of the Olympic Games. Control is difficult these days, when it is easy for everyone for example to film a 100-metre final with a cell phone or video camera and to put the clip on a blog. The IOC has issued strict blogging limitations for all persons accredited at the Olympic Games. The IOC has also purchased a computer program that surveys the internet and automatically detects all use of Olympic symbols and videos and images from Olympic Games. For instance at the Beijing Games of 2008, a total of 165,916 cases pertaining to immaterial rights of the Olympic movement were detected on the internet. 8,085 persons or entities were subjected to closer scrutiny, and some of them were contacted and urged to delete the material that offended immaterial rights of the Olympic movement or face a lawsuit.

5. ICSSPE

International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education (ICSSPE) is a wide-ranging international organisation, which covers all of the various fields of sport sciences, including sports law. Its membership of about 300 organisations includes government and municipal organs, international federations, universities and research centers, national sport associations, private sport facilities etc.

The Directory of Sport Science is a reference work published by ICSSPE at regular intervals in print and on the internet. It contains a section on international sports law.

I served on the Executive Board of ICSSPE for the maximum two terms, until 2008. As the only lawyer on the Board, I was mainly involved in questions concerning rules and their interpretations, contracts and administration, but naturally also took part in decisions on other issues of international sport science. Since my term in office I have assisted ICSSPE in formulating statements on the World Anti-Doping Code, the UNESCO doping agreement, sports betting and other related issues.

During my term in office, the President of ICSSPE was Professor Gudrun Doll-Tepper from Germany. She is one of the best association officials I have ever known. She sought to bring sports law into the fold of ICSSPE and invited me to a meeting in Munich in 2009, where the relations of international sports law associations and ICSSPE were discussed. The result was that the Germany-based International Sport Lawyers Association (ISLA) became a member of ICSSPE.

The flagship event of ICSSPE is ICSEMIS (International Convention on Science, Education and Medicine in Sport). Its original name was the Pre-Olympic Congress, but after the IOC became one of its organisers, the name was changed into ICSEMIS in order to avoid collusion with trademarks of the Olympic movement.

ICSEMIS has traditionally taken place every four years just before the Olympic Summer Games in the same country as the Games but in a different city. In 2000 it was held in Brisbane, in 2004 in Thessaloniki, in 2008 in Guangzhou and in 2012 in Glasgow. In Thessaloniki I gave a speech under the title “The Athlete’s Liability for Doping”.

Participation figures at ICSEMIS conventions have usually been high. More than 2,000 people, most of whom were Chinese, participated in the Guangzhou edition in 2008. In Glasgow 2012 the attendance fell to about 1,800, many of whom spent most of their time sightseeing in the city.

ICSSPE asked me to organise the section on sports law at the 2012 ICSEMIS in Glasgow. Given my previous involvement at ICSSPE I had to accept even if I knew that trouble was ahead. I was not wrong on that account.

I invited experts of international sports law I had come to know over the years as lecturers. I had collected contact information on 29 sports law associations in different countries and sent them all material on ICSEMIS and its sports law section. I also sent the same material to about 20 university faculties and research centers that studied or taught sports law. English sports lawyers were approached by an article I published in Sweet & Maxwell’s International Sports Law Review, a journal edited by my good friend Michael Beloff.

Still, participation was low when the event took place on Sunday, 21 July 2012. Only about 70 persons came to listen to the keynote speaker, the Canadian professor Richard McLaren. Other lecturers drew attendance figures of 25–30. Sports lawyers have obviously not perceived sports law as an area of sport science but only as an area of law. This conception needs perhaps to be changed.

6. Conclusion

Anti-doping work is not only a question of rules, medicine and sports law, but also of ethical attitude internal to the sport world. In 2010, I published an article titled “Juridical and ethical peculiarities in doping policy” in Journal of Medical Ethics together with Professor Mike McNamee of the University of Swansea, former President of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport. In the article, we discussed the concepts of guilt and strict liability, the principle of ne bis in idem and whereabouts regulations from both ethical and juridical points of view.

Attitude towards athletes who use doping in relation to athletes who do not is the central ethical question in sports today and will continue to be in the foreseeable future. WADA has been successful in its controlling efforts to such a degree that no one can buy banned substances at a pharmacist and use them without being caught sooner or later. However, today’s doping control methods cannot detect: 1) so-called design hormones that have been purposefully created in private laboratories, if their chemical composition is not known beforehand; and 2) gene drugs, which are probably making their way into elite sport.

Doping will thus remain an ethical, medical and juridical problem in the foreseeable future. Concurrently, doping law will continue to be the most specific area of international sports law and the one farthest away from normal practice of law.

Contact

Lauri Tarasti
Justice Member of the IOC Sport and Law Commission

Vanhaväylä 33 C
00830 Helsinki
Finland
Email:lauri.tarasti@kolumbus.fi

http://www.icsspe.org/