Roy Eric: Sports Anti-Doping Bill — First Reading 
Roy Eric: Sports Anti-Doping Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:628;Page:984] 
ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 National will definitely be supporting the bill going to the select committee. I have the view that anybody in this House who does not support the first reading of the bill should probably be swabbed because the need to have in place a range of mechanisms to keep sport as it should be—the pure and wholesome prevail of those who want to achieve by dint of training and ability—makes so much sense. 
If there were an example that we should use to show that this issue does have some currency it is today’s  
Dominion Post 
 headline “US sprinter banned for two years” and the article about Tim Montgomery a previous world record holder and his doping offences. That is just using today’s news as an example that the subject does have some real currency. 
So National will be supporting the bill certainly through the first reading in the select committee and at the subsequent stages. But we believe so strongly about this issue that we will be giving this legislation absolute scrutiny through every stage to ensure that we are able to provide adequate levels of protection the right incentives and the right enforcement procedures as far as New Zealand is concerned to play our part in what is a world international sports arena. 
New Zealand has been a world leader in this area for some considerable time. We have been right at the cutting edge of making decisions. We have not been at all tardy in accepting our responsibility in the arena of sports anti-doping. So we support the Minister’s comments about some of the details in the bill and I will not repeat those. 
The explanatory note of the Sports Anti-Doping Bill includes the code which states that doping is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sport. I think that sums it up. Doping puts at risk ethical principles and educational values and we support working against that. The bill will continue the New Zealand Sports Drug Agency as the national agency responsible for compliance with the code. It empowers the agency and changes and enhances its role in quite a number of ways. So National is supportive of the bill in every way. 
We have to protect our young people from some real dangers. Today sport is a business. Once it used to be a pursuit of competition; today it is a business. The rewards for those who achieve are so much greater than they were when I was a youngster although there were some opportunities then. Today when one sees the earning capacity of the top sportspeople around the world both in prize money and in endorsements from a range of commercial entities that associate themselves with sport one can understand the temptation that is there. 
We say it is good that people can and want to achieve. We support people who want to be winners but we want them to do it in a way that is fair and that does not put their bodies at risk. We now have a situation where there is just simply so much money attached to sport that probably the best chemists and doctors in the world are creating new enhancement drugs and the second best are trying to catch them. I think that that is simply the reality. So we need to say: “Let us empower those who have the responsibility of keeping sport clean.” That is entirely what we want to do. 
There are a few people who might ask what harm it does if people want to win as it is their bodies and it is the ultimate free market. But it simply is not that simple. There are clear and catalogued illustrations of how drug doping has had serious implications on the health of individuals. 
If members want a model of just what drug doping can do they should look at Germany. For about a millennia Germans were essentially the same people the same race. In fact one of their leaders in the 1930s thought they were the purest race in the world—although that is a debatable issue that I do not want to get into. But essentially all German people were the same. In 1960 a fence went up and cut one-third of the country off from the other two-thirds. Within 15 years in the mid-1970s one-third of the country had gone from winning one or two gold medals at the Olympics to being the second-greatest achiever in the Olympics in the world—winning something like 30 or 40 gold medals. That was in the period that the Minister mentioned: in the 1970s when the ability and the desire to control drugs internationally was much less. 
It is a matter of record now that in the late 1980s the Berlin Wall came down and the countries were merged. The performance of the winners of that former country in the Olympic arena has diminished considerably with the increased scrutiny of drug management drug control and the testing around international sports events. A number of very clearly documented illustrations show how some of those East German athletes’ bodies were distorted. Some of them even died. There was a high jumper—whose name escapes me at the moment—who died at a meet and subsequently was found in the autopsy to be overloaded with a range of performance-enhancing drugs. 
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that that behaviour is entirely inappropriate. At a time when our young people have enough to contend with in terms of planning careers studying fitting in family and training—balancing competition and the desire to win—to add something else into that mix such as whether they will be part of the doping scene in sport is just entirely inappropriate. I think that it is harder today to engage in the taking of performance-enhancing drugs. But because the money is there those who really want to pursue that course are able to do so. The desire to win can and does cloud judgment. 
I had a very limited involvement with athletics in the 1960s. I am no great shakes as an athlete but one thing I could do was throw a discus. I was probably competitive at most provincial meets. I can recall on one occasion going to the Caledonian ground in Dunedin. I was 18 years old 18 stone and straight off the swedes and I thought I could throw a discus—until this man-mountain arrived on the scene. His name was Robin Tait. He was just a veritable behemoth of a man. He had muscles in places where I did not even have places! He was just a huge powerful man. 
I do not want to besmirch Robin Tait; a man who won a number of medals for New Zealand at the Commonwealth Games and who performed quite adequately for us at a number of international meets. But there were a lot of anecdotal stories about Robin Tait and little blue pills and the way in which he had enhanced his performance. Sadly Robin Tait died in his 40s and I think members can draw whatever conclusions they like but certainly there is evidence that he would have been partaking in something that assisted him. 
In my own case it was not until later years that I actually took steroids for cancer and the repercussions of doing that even though I was in my 40s is that I now take a bigger size of shoe. My left foot is one and a half sizes bigger than my right. That happened on the taking of steroids. My left hand is 20 millimetres bigger than my right hand. That is something that just distorted my body in my 40s. So we cannot presume there is not a huge risk with the taking of steroids. As I say that is pretty well documented. 
Can I just say to the House that National supports this bill. We are keen to see in place the most rugged and robust rules surrounding the absolute exclusion of drugs in the sports arena. So we will be voting for the bill.