McLaren right man to investigate doping claims
Sports ethics expert admired for dedication to all athletes regardless of their profile
Bob Copeland knew the cold call was a long shot.
Currently, Copeland is the senior vice-president at McLaren Global Sport Solutions, consulting sport organizations on ethical issues. But in 2010, he was athletic director at the University of Waterloo, seeking a panel of experts to help his school to draft new policy after a steroid scandal had gutted its football team, so he phoned prominent sports lawyer Richard McLaren.
By then McLaren, a law professor at Western University, had long since established himself as a go-to arbitrator on sports ethics issues. In the past, he had investigated claims of steroid use and cover ups among U.S. track athletes at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and in 2007 he helped U.S. senator George Mitchell in his landmark investigation into doping in Major League Baseball. Copeland contacted McLaren knowing a lawyer that highly regarded might not have time for a case in the relatively low-profile world of Ontario university sport. But McLaren didn’t just answer Copeland’s call. He agreed to participate, and helped craft doping education policy for Ontario University Athletics.
In May, the world anti-doping agency (WADA) picked McLaren to lead a probe into widespread doping among Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics and Monday he’ll present his findings at the University of Toronto. People who have worked with McLaren say his willingness to tackle lightly-publicized cases such as the Waterloo football steroid scandal make him the ideal candidate to handle high-profile cases such as the Sochi doping allegations.
Colleagues say both speak to McLaren’s commitment to fairness for all athletes, regardless of the size of the stage on which they compete.
“He has so much presence globally, (but) is so dedicated to Canadian sport, and integrity in sport in Canada,” says Matoula Charitsis, president and co-founder of McLaren Global Sport Solutions. “It’s amazing the reach that he has.”
McLaren formed his consultancy in 2014 when Charitsis, a longtime colleague at Western who suggested he match his experience and reputation as a sports arbitrator with a growing need for impartial ethics oversight for sports organizations.
The company works with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, adjudicating the cases of fighters who appeal positive drug tests, and serves a similar role with the CFL.
“His credibility on a world stage with respect to anti-doping … aligned with Richard being the right choice for us,” says Kevin McDonald, the CFL’s director of football operations.
Colleagues say McLaren’s expertise extends well beyond sport.
W. Iain Scott has spent the last five years as the dean of Western’s law school, but in 1976 he was a first-year law student at Queens taking a class on a law governing personal property security. The law had only recently been passed but there already was a textbook. The author? McLaren.
While Scott credits McLaren with helping build Western’s sports law program, he says McLaren is still invaluable as a professor. In the classroom, Scott says, McLaren is less a lecturer than a facilitator, prodding students to think critically and solve problems.
He says those same qualities make him an effective adjudicator in sports ethics cases.
“Not all lawyers have this — he’s very thoughtful, very considered, and he observes first before he acts,” Scott says. “He’s not talking before he’s thinking, and that’s what he’s trying to instill in the students. Think and analyze and look at things from different perspectives.”
In the incident at the heart of Mon- day’s report, stakes are high.
Earlier this year, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory, detailed in the New York Times an elaborate scheme to cover up widespread doping among Russian athletes at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Rodchenkov described team doctors giving athletes hard liquor before drug tests to help mask performance-enhancing drugs that might appear in urine samples. And he says Russian anti-doping officials charged with guarding samples routinely tampered with them to eliminate evidence of doping among Russians.
The fate of several medallists from Sochi depends on McLaren’s findings. U.S. skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender finished fourth in Sochi, one spot behind a Russian athlete suspected of doping.
“I’ll never know what it feels like to stand on the podium in Sochi, but I want to put this behind me,” Uhlaender told the New York Times. “I want to know: Am I a bronze medallist?”
In June, McLaren, who also helped investigate systemic doping among Russia’s track athletes, issued a statement calling Rodchenkov’s claims “both credible and verifiable.”