Topic: News: Bizarre Legal Rulings RE: Doping in Olympic Sports

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

Link

Bizarre Legal Rulings Regarding Doping in Olympic Sports
By Doug Gillon

As Mr Bumble put it in Oliver Twist: "The law is an ass." What he would have made of sports law might have been beyond the wit of Dickens to define.

Yesterday's developments in the quasi-legal sporting arena beggar belief and will seriously undermine confidence in the process.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) allowed a convicted cheat to keep his Commonwealth gold medal, denying Scottish weightlifter Tom Yule an upgrade to silver, while another doping offender, the notorious Greek Ekaterini Thanou, threatend to sue the Olympic movement if they do not give her the gold medal forfeit by Marion Jones.

The Herald revealed last Saturday how 94-kilo lifter Yule stood to have his Commonwealth bronze from Melbourne upgraded, after the winner, Armenian-born Australian Aleksan Karapetyan, was implicated in a doping offence, for a stimulant.

Normally the two-year penalty dates from the time of the offence, which would have ruled out Karapetyan. But the Aussie authorities applied the suspension from the day after he won gold in Melbourne - despite the fact that he had immediately retired!

Remarkably, CAS agreed this was appropriate, dismissing an appeal against The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA). Jon Doig, chief executive of the Commonwealth Games Council for Scotland, learned the news yesterday from ASADA who were even awarded £2955 costs by CAS.

"We're surprised, and deeply upset for the athletes involved, especially Tom Yule, who has been a model athlete for Scotland," said Doig. Ironically the message he received from ASADA concluded with an appeal to phone their hotline and help "Stamp Out Doping".

"I have not seen all the papers, and may be missing something, but I don't think so," said Yule last night. "I don't know how this could happen. Doping rules should be simple, but it seems there's one rule for one person and and a different one for another. It's hard enough to catch cheats. Now, when you do, there's a variable sentence.

"Sport is a long way from being a level playing field. This does not give you any faith in the system. It is supposed to protect clean athletes, and in this case it clearly has not."

Simon Heffernan, the Australian who stood to inherit gold, said it was a slap in the face to innocent athletes. Other athletes who had used the same drug had been denied the right to compete in Melbourne where Karapetyan was allowed to lift despite having failed a test in 2005.

Doig has explored the possibility of appealing on behalf of Yule. "But the CAS verdict is binding. We have no place in the process, because we are a third party."

Meanwhile, Thanou said she would consider suing the International Olympic Committee if doesn't award her Jones's 100m gold from Sydney. On Thursday Jones was formally stripped of her five Olympic medals from 2000, but the IOC has a dilemma over reallocation.

The movement is seething, because their rules state the runner-up inherits in the case of a doping default. Thanou failed no controls in Sydney, but in Athens in 2004 she was at the centre of a scandal.

She and compatriot Kostadinos Kenteris, defending men's 200m champion, missed a third anti-doping test on the eve of the Games, leading to a two-year ban which expired last year. Criminal charges of perjury and falsifying evidence remain outstanding. They were hospitalised, claiming they had been injured in a motorbike crash, but the machine itself bore hardly a scratch, and there were allegations that it was concocted to evade the test.

Thanou "believes she has to be awarded the gold", said her lawyer, Gregory Ioannidis. "If not, we'd have to consider if legal action needs to be taken."

Olympic president Jacques Rogge is to contact the US Department of Justice for more information regarding an on-going investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory in San Francisco that supplied banned drugs to several athletes, before reallocating any medals.

There has been no hint of Thanou's involvement there and Ioannidis said she was also considering legal action to prevent the IOC from linking her name to the US case.

* Hurdler Elmar Lichtenegger has decided to retire after testing positive for nandrolone for the second time since 2003. The 33-year-old Austrian, who was European Championship silver medallist, blamed bad nutrition supplements.