‘There will be cases before the Olympics that will shock people’
Brett Clothier is earning impressive results with investigative approach, he tells Robert Dineen
Even with a background working on the biggest doping scandal to strike Australian rules football, involving 30 Essenden players who were found to have injected a performance-enhancing substance, Brett Clothier admits he has been taken aback by the scale of drug-taking that the Athletics Integrity Unit has found since he took over the anti-doping agency in 2017.
“A lot of aspects of doping that go on around the world did come as a surprise,” the Australian former sports lawyer says, while sitting in the AIU offices overlooking the yachts moored in Monaco bay. “I was probably naive – I shouldn’t have been. It’s all the world. It’s a very diverse population group, so I don’t want to paint anyone with one brush, but a lot of the doping is for economic reasons. There’s money to be made. People come from very poor countries. Testing is nonexistent or inadequate.
“And people will dope. But now, the situation is probably as good as it has ever been. We’re showing that we can catch people.”
The unit was established three years ago in the wake of the financial scandal surrounding Lamine Diack, the former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations.
Diack was alleged to have been involved in financial corruption and money-laundering, charges the former official has denied in a French court where his case is ongoing. The reputational damage to athletics was severe, however, and prompted Lamine’s successor Lord Coe to replace the IAAF anti-doping department with the AIU in the hope of restoring public faith in the sport.
With an annual budget of around €8million (£6.72million), the unit was given double the funding of the old department. Unusually for an international sport’s integrity department, it was also promised complete independence from the ruling body, now called World Athletics.
It is based in the same building as the AIU, but Clothier says Lord Coe has kept to his word and not interfered with the unit’s work.
“That was really important,” he said. “It gave us a great platform.”
With an initial team of five, the unit has now expanded to 30 staff, broadly comprising testing, education, legal and investigative teams. Proportionately speaking, it was in the final department that the AIU invested its most resources, a significant departure from the typical set-up of an anti-doping agency, and most of its work to date has been around drug-taking, with plans afoot to broaden its focus soon.
“Our key first decision was that we’re not going to do more tests,” Clothier says. “We needed to build the intelligence capability. The way anti-doping had been done was not effective.”
The type of testing and its timings needed to be more precisely chosen to catch cheats, rather than random examinations in broad testing windows. It was not producing enough results. “We recruited people who are used to working in difficult, complex environments,” Clothier says. “In the international law or security service field, people who have the capability to go into hostile places and be able to understand what’s going on, and gather information so that it becomes actionable.”
By working together with the scientists, he says, investigators can “target” suspected athletes. “They plan the testing in very small windows, to the day, the week, to the hour if we need, to ensure we do the right test for the right substance on the right athlete.” The results have been impressive. Excluding cases involving the retesting of historic samples, the IAAF’S anti-doping department brought 32 sanctions across athletics in 2016. The AIU had 65 such cases last year, mainly involving medal hopes.
Probably their biggest one to date is the charges related to Danil Lysenko, Russia’s world indoor high-jump champion. His data was found to have been tampered with, leading to provisional suspensions for the athlete, the president of the Russian athletics federation and several of its officials. Most of the allegations were disputed. The cases are pending.
The AIU has chosen to channel its resources into targeting elite athletes. Can, then, the public expect cases involving Olympic hopefuls before the Tokyo Games this summer? “More than a third of our cases are World Championship or Olympic medallists or major marathon winners, so based on what has happened in the past, yes, for sure there will be cases before the Olympics that will
shock people.”