ABSTRACT
Should doping be criminalised? In the last 2 years the investigations of corruption at FIFA (e.g. Lynch, 2015) and the IAAF (e.g. WADA Independent Commission, 2015) have successfully moved the issue of sport governance from the back to the front page of newspapers. In reaction to these (and other) investigations, at the 2015 Australian and New Zealand Sports Law Association conference, WADA Director General David Howman, asked, somewhat rhetorically: ‘How big a disaster do you need to start reflecting on the issue of governance? How big a disaster do you need to look at issues of integrity and what’s going on?’. Howman then went on to suggest that imprisonment could be the most effective way to get rid of doping in sport:
I want to pose the question: should doping be a criminal matter? It is in Italy, and we think – some of us – that the real deterrent that cheating athletes fear is the fear of going to prison. Not the fear of being stood down from their sport for a year, two years, four years but a fear of going to prison.
