CFL may look to U.S. labs for drug testing: Orridge
Commissioner breaks ties with centre that refuses to test CFLers
FORT MCMURRAY — Jeffrey Orridge has been on the job for less than three months, and the new Canadian Football League commissioner is already dealing with a crisis.
With the 2015 season set to officially kick off on June 25, Orridge broke ties with the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport after Christine Ayotte, the director of the INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier Research Centre in Laval, Que., said last week that she wouldn’t test CFL players for doping violations.
Ayotte feels the league is too lenient on first-time offenders and disagrees with the league’s refusal to honour university bans.
The centre’s lab is the only permanent one in Canada approved by the World AntiDoping Agency.
Orridge was in Fort McMurray Saturday for the Edmonton Eskimos and Saskatchewan Roughriders preseason game.
“We’re in conversations — very significant conversations — with a number of different alternatives, but we’re in pretty good shape,” Orridge said of the move he and the CFL Players Association announced on June 10.
“We feel that the testing is not going to (be) interrupted and will continue to service the league and the players and preserve the integrity of the league.”
Looking to American labs for testing is “under discussion now,” Orridge said.
“But we’re going to look at the best possible alternative.”
Ayotte told CBC Ottawa last week that she refused to test CFL players because there are no consequences for doping violators. Last year, Canadian Interuniversity Sport suspended five players for four years each due to doping violations; three of those players were selected in last month’s Canadian draft.
“We feel that there’s always room for improvement and this process is constantly evolving,” Orridge said of drafting players caught doping.
The league has been criticized for its private handling of players caught doping in the CFL. First-time offenders are referred to counselling and rehabilitation, with suspensions coming for subsequent offences: three games for a second offence, a year for a third offence and a lifetime ban for a fourth offence.
Orridge defended that privacy and touted the results he says the league has seen in its five years working with the league’s players association on performance-enhancing drugs.
“We’re very proud of our record, the fact that in the four or five years that we’ve been instituting this policy, there have been no repeat positive tests, so that’s pretty good,” he said. “Whatever we’re doing is working after you get into the league.
“What we focus on is education and rehabilitation. If people make mistakes, they have the opportunity — just like the Canadian way — they have the opportunity to get back on track.”