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Parkinson: 'Cheats must be petrified of coming to UK'

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David Owen - Inside the Games 22 June 2009

This interview was conducted by David Owen and first appeared on Inside the Games yesterday.

In an hour-long interview at UK Sport’s HQ, not far from the British Museum, Andy Parkinson emerges as both knowledgeable on the bureaucratic, legal and scientific complexities that come with the territory of anti-doping and, so far as I can judge, candid.

His responses are mercifully free of both jargon and clichéd sound-bites.

You sense strongly that his judgements are grounded in the real world of the fight against doping, rather than abstract theory.

As Parkinson explains, one of the big changes set to come about once the NADO is established by the end of this year is that a more centralised approach will be taken to the management of doping cases in the UK.

“By accepting public money,” he says, “[National Governing Bodies] accept that they are delegating their results management authority to the NADO.

“There is one tiny caveat…which is that if an NGB can demonstrate that they have competent disciplinary procedures, they can choose to present the case within their own independent tribunal.

“But what can’t be delegated to them is that there is a case to prosecute.

“So the NADO in all cases will say, ‘There’s a case…we are either going to prosecute it in front of the National Anti-Doping Panel on behalf of Sport X or we are going to give it to Sport Y.

‘You prosecute it in front of your own independent panel on which we have done a quality assurance - we know that it’s sufficiently skilled.

‘You make your own decision and we still retain the appeal rights if a wrong decision is made.’”

He goes on: “If I was a sport I’d be looking at this thinking, ‘Great, I don’t have to pay for case prosecution any more; I get somebody else to deal with all the intricacies of case management.’

“I think the real added value for the sports is they can have a single pure focus on supporting their athletes.

“We don’t get the potential conflict within a national federation where potentially you’ve got the poster boy or girl of that sport potentially being prosecuted on a case that might damage that sport.

“Every indication we’ve got is that the sports are really welcoming it.”

Well Resourced

To do its job properly in such circumstances, the NADO is going to need to be well resourced and Parkinson confirms that the body’s budget for its first full year of operation commencing April 2010 should be just over £7.2 million.

“We are taking our £4.5 million that we currently get from Exchequer through UK Sport,” he says, “of which about £0.5 million is income we receive from testing.

“Some sports top up their testing programme and we do it on a cost-recovery basis.

“And then we have got a combination commitment from UK Sport and from [the Department for Culture, Media and Sport] that they would then take that £4.5 million up to £7.2 million.

“We couldn’t have been in a worse time to try and top up the funding of an independent agency, where not only was the world in meltdown but also so much government policy is about centralisation and sharing back offices and we are saying, ‘In actual fact we can’t do that.’”

His approximate breakdown of how this £7.2 million will be divvied up runs as follows:

“I think it’s approximately £2 million staff costs; around £1 million legal/case management costs; our testing programme runs at around about £2 million, which is £1 million for collection and £1 million for analysis; education is about £0.5 million; and then corporate costs, building lease, infrastructure, IT plus miscellaneous elements.”

At present, it is expected that staff levels at the NADO would build up to just over 50.

Parkinson talks of 14 new anti-doping positions, “largely in intelligence and legal or case management”.

Of course, the nature of its role means that the new body stands to be in direct line of fire should aggrieved athletes decide to sue.

“I think we are going to have to be smart”, Parkinson says, “just as the Crown Prosecution Service is smart about whether it’s in the public interest to prosecute certain cases.

“I think we are actually going to have to say what are we really interested in here…and I think we have to do it pretty rapidly.

“Because potentially what we could be doing is prosecuting low-level athletes on low-risk substances which cost time and money to get through the National Anti-Doping Panel but actually have very limited impact on elite sport…

“It would be lovely to have a limitless pot…to go after every person who has committed an anti-doping rule violation, but we do have to be smart.

“If there’s a [really serious transgressor] out there, we have to prosecute it; if there’s someone on a cannabis finding, for example, who’s a low-level athlete, we would prosecute it, but we would do it in a much more cost-efficient way, maybe through a plea bargaining.”

NADO's biggest challenge

Information-sharing with other government agencies is likely to be one key determinant of the new body’s success, so it is perhaps no surprise that Parkinson ranks this as the NADO’s “biggest challenge”.

“Not because we can’t do it,” he adds, “But just because of the scope of what we could potentially be walking into.

“How do you determine a piece of intelligence about an anabolic steroid is linked to sport?”

He goes on: “The gateways we are looking at opening are in principle the SOCA gateway [with the Serious Organised Crime Agency].

“They have the SOCA Act, which basically sets them out as one of the principal law enforcement agencies for national and international crime.

“We have identified with SOCA a tremendous willingness to be engaged with us.”

Moreover: “There is a bill for the UK Border Agency going through the House at the moment, which is basically hiving off the border aspect of HMRC into its own agency.

“That bill…as it stands allows for the potential for us to establish an information-sharing agreement with UK Borders which we certainly see as being a very influential and important area for us.

“I think with SOCA and UK Borders we have got the start of two very strong relations and after a time, we’ll work out whether we need to establish different ones with say the Association of Chief Police Officers…

“We have to be very sensitive to the fact that law enforcement’s needs trump the needs of the sporting environment.

“But there’s a much more sensitive time pressure in sport than there is in law enforcement because you want to stop someone competing.”

Improvements in athlete education

The athletes themselves may not actually notice much difference as the new body cranks into action.

Parkinson sees the present number of tests, at 7,500, as “probably about right” and says that he hopes athletes see no difference in the “front-line delivery of sample collection”.

“I would hope that athletes see ongoing improvements in our education delivery,” he says.

“I think probably what they will also start to see is a single body issuing decisions on doping athletes.

“But in terms of the intelligence stuff…if they are clean athletes, they are not going to see anything different.

“If they are a doping athlete, I would expect them to be a lot more worried that if they are buying EPO over a website, we are going to have a much greater ability to intercept and to ban that athlete from receiving the EPO.”

When I ask him if he anticipates coming under political pressure should lots of British athletes start testing positive in the run-up to London 2012, Parkinson says he would be “pretty disappointed”, while arguing that the new body, as the entity that will be dealing with the cases, “is established to absorb the pressure”.

“If it was still here, there would be enormous pressure, I think, on sports generally who were having to prosecute one year before an Olympic Games their own athletes.

“And I think there would be enormous pressure on UK Sport, the high-performance funding agency for sport, also to start thinking about, ‘How do we manage our significant investment in sport when in actual fact half the building is prosecuting and banning athletes who might medal at the Games’.

“So I don’t anticipate any pressure, political or otherwise.”

With London’s Big Moment in the international spotlight now barely three years away, time is one luxury the NADO will not have as it seeks to get properly up and running.

“Our original projections were April 2009 with a window through to the end of this year where we felt that we could have enough time to learn some pretty complex new functions so that we are up to speed well before 2012,” Parkinson says.

“Because our role from our side kicks in 18 months before the Games rather than at the Games.

"We need to make sure that anyone who wants to cheat is absolutely petrified of coming to the UK.

“And that’s going to take a bit of time for us to get up to speed with our law enforcement relations, credibility and confidence within the case management system and getting those strong messages out internationally and domestically.”

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