ABSTRACT
If anyone doubted the corrosive effect that the drugs issue is having in modern sport, they should look at my professional diary. Between May 1998 and May 1999 – to take a sample year – I advised the two British weightlifters in litigation arising out of their expulsion from the Barcelona Olympics; I chaired a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) Panel in Lausanne in the (unsuccessful) appeal of the Chinese swimmers tested positive at the Perth World Championships – an appeal against my judgment to the Swiss Federal Court of Appeal has been rejected; I sat on a CAS Panel in the cases of Michelle Smith, the Irish swimming multiple gold medallist from Atlanta and of Peter Korda, the Czech tennis star; I headed a UK Athletics Committee of Inquiry into the affair of Dougie Walker, the European 200 m champion; I argued cases for the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) in Monte Carlo against Mary Decker-Slaney and Dennis Mitchell; and – just to prove that the problem is not restricted to human competitors – I pronounced another CAS decision in the case of an owner who insisted on entering her horse in an international equestrian event although it had recently been treated with phenylbutazone. Nor is my experience atypical. In the recently published Digest of Awards1 of the CAS, there is a special section on appeals concerning doping cases – the largest section in the book. The IAAF’s casebook is entirely devoted to the subject.2
