Locke Keith: Sports Anti-Doping Bill — First Reading 
Locke Keith: Sports Anti-Doping Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:628;Page:991] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting this bill. I want to look at the question from a number of angles. My colleague Eric Roy said that the desire to win can cloud the judgment of sportspeople and I do agree. We have to look at the pressures on athletes to do that sort of thing nowadays as they know that they are going to hurt their health by taking such drugs in order to win. 
I think there is a problem in society with winning being everything. In the past participating and doing one’s best was what people aspired to. Now winning has become everything. The glory comes to the winner and in the international sports setting there are so many rewards for being No. 1. We can see that in the performances of our own athletes and in the attitude of the public both in New Zealand and around the world to our athletes’ performances. I am thinking of someone like Ben Fouhy our kayaker in the Olympics who came second in his race. He was subject to some criticism: “Oh you’ve been world champion and you didn’t win at the Olympics.” The pressure on him to win was so great even though he gave a fantastic performance and came second to a Norwegian who was really at the top of his game. 
Also the financial rewards internationally in terms of sponsorships and everything else have grown so much that to win means one can perhaps be a multimillionaire and live in comfort for the rest of one’s days. If one happens to come second at the Olympic Games then all of those rewards do not come one’s way. So there is the social pressure combined with the pressure of commercial sport which is not good. The pressure is also driven by the attitudes of the public and media in New Zealand. 
The other unfortunate pressure is the pressure of national interest and Eric Roy talked about the East European Governments of the past who were so desperate for national glory through getting a lot of medals at an Olympic Games—East Germany in particular—that they were engaged in doping on a substantial scale. In fact as I understand it if a person was in an East German or Czechoslovakian team he or she was ordered to take those drugs. People had to take those drugs or they were not on the squad. That has led to great problems and not only in Eastern Europe. 
American authorities seemed to be under similar pressure to make sure that their athletes won. A couple of years ago we heard of a whole pile of athletes including Carl Lewis who seemed to be caught up in this pressure to take drugs. Carl Lewis was deemed to have taken not just one type but three types of banned stimulants. When the international agencies—the International Olympic Committee and others—looked at the United States Olympic Association and what it had done they were rather horrified that the defence of people like Carl Lewis was that they did not have any intent to take a drug. 
The World Anti-Doping Agency chairman Dick Pound dismissed the no-intent defence. He said he had seen copies of US documents and that there was almost what he called “automatic forgiveness” by US officials. They were so desperate to have a lot of their people win gold medals that they tended to look the other way. The International Olympic Committee’s medical commission chairman Arne Ljungqvist said that the US Olympic Committee documents fitted a pattern of failure to report positive drug cases. So we can see that a perceived national interest can blind authorities to the dangers of that. Tim Montgomery the 100 metres world record holder has now been banned for a couple of years and perhaps he should be banned for life for being caught up in drugs. In all possibility his partner Marion Jones who also won gold medals at the Olympics was also taking drugs. 
What does this do to athletes who are really trying to do their best? One of the problems—and I refer back to the East European doping in the past—is that some world records date from that period when there was almost universal doping of East European athletes. Women in particular gained an advantage out of it. Some of those athletics records are still on the books. The problem for athletes today is that they can excel at the very top of their sport and be at world record - holder level but those world records are still on the books and in their way. 
Flo Jo’s—Florence Griffiths Joiner’s—records for the 100 metres and 200 metres are still I think on the books in spite of the fact that most people recognise that they are likely to be drug-induced world records. That is very bad. It is also bad for the fans as well. We all took great pride in Carl Lewis’s performance. He was a hero to many and it does tarnish the public’s identification with sport and with the progress of the athletes if they later find out that the athletes are involved in drugs. The performance of Robin Tait who was mentioned by Eric Roy is a similar example. We had a lot of pride in his performance in the shot-put and discus and in his gold medals and records. We then found out—he openly admitted it in later life—that he had been involved in steroid taking. Graham May our Christchurch weight lifter who was also a medal winner was also found to have taken drugs. People’s interest in sport is deflated as is their identification with the athletes and their performances if they find that out in later life. 
I am glad that the Minister in his introductory speech talked about out-of-season testing. There is a problem in that some athletes get around drug testing by taking drugs as they are leading up to a performance and then when they know the testing regime is going to kick in closer to the competitive athletics they stop taking the drugs. The drugs disappear from their systems but they have had the benefit of them by that time. So there is out-of-season testing and random testing and another thing that can help is holding blood samples for later testing. Sometimes athletes are at the front edge of scientific experimentation in drugs and they can get away with taking drugs because testing has not caught up with a particular drug. So holding blood samples for later testing can help to avoid the situation of world records by the Florence Griffith Joyners the Tim Montgomerys or the East European athletes in the past. Their world records cannot be taken from the books because there was no system to check drug testing at the time. 
I conclude by saying that this is a serious issue. As Tau Henare mentioned sport is a part of our national identity. We want to make sure that we in New Zealand are a model in this respect. Even if we know that some other nations might be cheating and getting the edge we just have to have confidence that our own athletes are performing to their highest ability. There has been no suspicions around Sarah Ulmer who performed fantastically in cycling or most of our other athletes and I think we can be proud in that respect.