Cricket 2.0
Page 30
Such policies seem designed for an era in which international cricket was still indisputably king. Yet now it looks archaic that some leading players in the IPL, Big Bash and other T20 leagues – players including Shane Watson, Brendon McCullum, Kieron Pollard and Kevin Pietersen in recent years – spent years not liable for drug testing by the ICC, after their international careers were over, while comparatively obscure, and far worse paid, players still playing international cricket were.
‘It is ridiculous really – hopeless,’ said Ivan Waddington, an anti-doping specialist from the University of Chester. ‘If you’re going to have a whereabouts rule you have to have one properly. Every player beyond a given level has to know they may be eligible to be tested by an out-of-competition test at any one time.’
Out of competition testing is the bedrock of successful testing programmes, Waddington said. ‘Anyone who fails in competition testing has to be pretty stupid or pretty incompetent because you know when the date of competition is.
‘If cricketers are using performance-enhancing drugs then I’d have thought that they’d be unlikely to be picked up by a system which is full of holes.’
Freelance players not being eligible for any out-of-competition testing by the ICC was a particular concern. This meant that, unless their national anti-doping organisations do out-of-competition tests – which is rare for cricket – such players wouldn’t be subject to any out-of-competition testing whatsoever.
‘Other drugs which are used during training periods, such as anabolic steroids, are better detected in out-of-competition testing when athletes are training at home,’ Petroczi explained. Athletes using performance-enhancing drugs cut down on their usage as their next tournament nears; if they doped in between T20 leagues and were tested during these leagues, their doping may well pass undetected.
‘It’s the guys who decide to cut their ties with their national federation and not play any cricket nationally that will be able to wander around the world,’ said David Howman, the former director-general of WADA. ‘So you could go from league to league and never be tested.’
As the ICC is only responsible for testing in international cricket it is up to leagues themselves to organise testing in domestic competitions.
As with anti-corruption, the attention given to doping varies markedly between leagues. There are around 80 tests in the Indian Premier League each season. Yet in the Bangladesh Premier League, considered the second-best paying league in the world at the time, there were no drugs tests at all in the first three years. In the next three seasons – in 2016, 2017 and early 2019 – there were only between eight and 12 tests each year.
The Caribbean Premier League conducted only two tests per team in their first two seasons – players could not be tested if two of their teammates had already been tested during the tournament, unless they reached the final when there was an extra test per team. Since 2015, the league has enlisted the ICC to conduct their tests, but said that it was unaware of the numbers. In the Pakistan Super League, the number of tests conducted each season rose from between 14 and 18, in the first three seasons, to 30 in 2019, an improvement but still a very modest number. Largely for reasons of budget, the Hong Kong Blitz tournament, which attracted a high calibre of overseas players, and was a vehicle to get picked up in a more high-profile league, did not do any drugs testing at all in its first three seasons.
‘Inconsistency would not be surprising given the lack of enforceable global minimum standards across the sanctioned cricket framework under current regulations,’ Irish explained. Australia and England, which both considered themselves among the leaders for drug testing in cricket, refused to divulge official figures for the number of tests they conducted in their T20 leagues. In total, 262 tests were conducted by the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2018, across all levels of the sport at men’s and women’s level. Cricket Australia said they conducted an average of over 500 tests a year in total from 2014 to 2019 across the men’s and women’s game.
The small but growing number of private T20 leagues might be particularly susceptible to doping. In 2018, the Global T20 Canada League attracted players including Chris Gayle, David Warner, Steve Smith and Lasith Malinga – yet did not do any drug tests at all.
‘It’s a concern for the world of cricket when they’ve got these private leagues,’ Howman said. ‘The fact that these leagues are privately owned and privately run means that they are outside of the normal anti-doping programmes unless the players are members of their national federations. If they don’t have any doping clause in the contracts then there’s nothing to scrutinise.
‘Any player who is freelance will not be in any testing pool, and is therefore unable to be tested by the ICC out of competition. The player free agency trend in cricket does emphasise the need to ensure that there are coordinated player education programmes around the world.’ In New Zealand, for instance, players who appeared in any competition in a country signed up to the World Anti-Doping Code could be tested in theory. But the national anti-doping organisation in New Zealand prioritised ‘current and emerging [age-group] national sport representatives for our out-of-competition testing,’ a spokesperson for Drug Free Sport New Zealand explained.
The lack of standardised testing in T20 leagues means that the risk-reward calculation for would-be dopers in Bangladesh’s T20 league, say, is a lot more favourable than for those in Australia’s. There is a worrying divergence between anti-doping policies in different countries – including in their T20 leagues – with the frequency and quality of drug testing varying widely. As such, Irish viewed ‘the risks [of doping] lying more across the T20 leagues landscape where there is no consistent regulatory framework and no consistent education of players.’
Most national anti-doping organisations budget for little, or any, testing at all in cricket, because it has historically been viewed as low risk, and these bodies prioritise Olympic sports. This means that domestic tests are normally funded by the national governing bodies for cricket in a particular country – where the funds and inclination to test vary hugely between nations.
The upshot of such an inconsistent and fragmented anti-doping structure is that the true scale of doping is hard to gauge. ‘You’d like to see more consistent testing,’ said one senior medical official for a Full Member nation. ‘The big question that we don’t know the answer to is how big a problem is this? Clearly if cricket isn’t doing as much testing as other sports it probably comes from a position that assumes that doping isn’t as prevalent. It’s a dangerous assumption.’
Even the biggest league in the world was far from implementing best practice on doping. ‘If the IPL wanted to show that they were world leaders then they would run a programme which would be overseen by the ICC and monitored by WADA. That would give them a seal of approval,’ said Howman, the former director-general of WADA.
***
A comparison with baseball illustrated how tepid cricket’s anti-drugs policies were. In 2018 baseball conducted around 27,000 tests at Major and Minor League level in the US. In cricket worldwide in 2018, there were just 1,434 drugs tests done, according to the ICC. So there were 19 times more tests in baseball in the US alone than all of cricket.
In Major League Baseball, each player was tested an average of ten times during the season. But in T20 cricket in 2018 there were just 978 domestic drugs tests, amounting to 0.47 tests per player. Even including ICC tests, there were just 0.68 drugs tests per T20 player worldwide in 2018. Both these figures were actually slightly inflated: the figures included tests on female cricketers too, though the vast majority were in the men’s game.
Drug Testing and Violations in Cricket (Figures from ICC, covering men’s and women’s cricket – NB all violations to date in the men’s game)
Year
ICC Testing
ICC Violations
Domestic Testing
Domestic Violations
2014
456
0
>
728
2
2015
385
0
559
1
2016
447
1
547
2
2017
387
1
759
3
2018
456
0
978
6
In practice this meant that T20 players, especially those retired from international duty, could go years without any testing. Hundreds of players would know that, for large windows of the year, they had only a minuscule risk of being tested. As such, players could dope at periods when their chances of being tested were negligible; the drugs would then have washed out of their system by the time that they played in one of the few leagues with even a reasonably thorough doping programme. If players doped in such a strategic way and were then tested during these leagues, the players would not test positive.
Steroids, for instance, typically take a few weeks to pass out of an athlete’s system, creating scope for players to use them between major competitions. Before a season, a batsman could use a course of steroids to ‘build up the shoulders and muscles in the arms’ and would not need to take the drug when they returned to play to benefit from it, said Ivan Waddington, an anti-doping specialist from the University of Chester.
‘With doping it’s presumed that in-competition testing is only scratching the surface,’ explained a medical official from a leading nation. ‘At a minimum you need really good out-of-competition testing. Certainly there’s a washout period for everything so you can get a lot of advantage out of competition.’
The rise in free agency made the need to coordinate player education programmes throughout the world particularly pressing. The new T20 landscape, with players more transient and based in their home countries less frequently, renders educating players consistently more difficult. ‘A comprehensive, accessible and minimum gold standard global education programme’ was needed to reduce the discrepancies in doping education between countries, Irish said. ‘We think the entire anti-doping framework needs to be looked at moving forward.’
Worldwide, ‘there should be greater surveillance and requirements of the independent tournaments,’ said Dr Manjra, chairman of Cricket South Africa’s medical committee. ‘With the rise of high-profile, money-spinning leagues it could become a problem. Now we have players like A.B. de Villiers and Chris Gayle who jump from T20 to T20 tournament – professional T20 players. There will be more in the future as the nature of the game changes – where players will essentially be free agents and not contracted. So we need to flag it as a risk.’
The paucity of drug testing in cricket may also have encouraged a culture of recreational drug use. In 2019, just before the 50-over World Cup, England’s batsman Alex Hales was dropped from the national squad after twice failing tests for recreational drugs.
Even for international players, there may also be stark differences in how often those from different countries are tested, outside of ICC-run events. One medical official working inside cricket suggested that countries not always accompanied by a team doctor – all those apart from Australia, England, South Africa and New Zealand – might be especially vulnerable to doping. ‘One of the roles of the doctor is to check WADA compliance for any medications or substances that each player is considering taking, and teams which don’t consider medical input to be important are clearly not going to be doing compliance checks to nearly the same extent. You’d tend to think that if doctors don’t have a presence around a team that there won’t be much checking of WADA compliance.’ In 2017, according to WADA, the West Indies Cricket Board only conducted 12 drugs tests for steroids. The BCCI only conducted ten – and the Bangladesh Cricket Board just one.
Players could pass tests even if they were doping: Lance Armstrong passed 250 drugs tests without failing one, largely because he was warned before testers would come. An anonymous survey at the World Athletics Championships in 2011 found that one-third of athletes admitted to taking banned substances, yet under 2% fail a doping test each year. And so while higher numbers of drugs tests ostensibly indicates that a league or national board takes the threat of doping seriously, the tests that really count are targeted tests driven by investigative work, which cost tens of times more to do than routine ad hoc testing.
Across sport, ‘we’re spending a lot of money running a testing programme where other parts of our society would probably be told to shut it down because it’s not producing the results we might expect from our investment,’ Howman said. ‘There doesn’t seem to me to be too much worry about that.
‘Testing is one thing, numbers is one thing, the quality and efficiency of testing is another. You and I could go out today and test 50 cricketers and say we’ve tested 50 cricketers and none of them were positive. You’ve got to have a programme which is proactive and not randomly select people. That’s the only chance you’ve got of getting an effective programme – otherwise the science isn’t up to it.’
Without such testing, doping may be alluring, especially for players in less policed T20 leagues.
‘You then have to worry about their agents and other members of their entourage who have to ensure they make money as well. That’s a common factor in other team sports, particularly at a lower level – so those who are trying to break into it are often tempted to be doing things they shouldn’t be doing,’ Howman reflected. ‘In lower levels of tennis it goes on because there’s less scrutiny and less risk of being caught. So that happens in cricket as well, I’m sure.’
Yet if the lesson from other sports is that only testing based on rigorous investigative work is likely to yield results, the degree to which it has been absorbed by different leagues is unclear. And so too often, for T20 players – especially freelancers – the deterrents to doping are weak. According to insiders, only a tiny proportion of drugs tests in cricket are on the basis of rigorous intelligence work of the sort that is much more likely to catch cheats.
‘I don’t know how you can pretend that elite athletes, including cricketers, are in any way worried about being caught if they decide to cheat,’ said Renee Anne Shirley, the well-respected former head of the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission. ‘Bottom line, if cricketers take care and dope in the off season, it is doubtful that testing them in the margins of international competition in their hotel rooms or training facilities that their doping will be caught.’
Shirley said that cricket’s vulnerability to doping was best viewed as a microcosm of the wider vulnerabilities in the sports ecosystem. ‘[The] global anti-doping model is not working and needs a radical overhaul.’
***
Even when players contravened anti-doping rules, rulings often haven’t been enforced with much severity. Afghanistan’s Mohammad Shahzad, once ranked the seventh-best T20 batsman in the world, was banned in 2017 after testing positive for clenbuterol, an anabolic agent which was once popular in East Germany, in an out-of-competition test. Shahzad received a 12-month ban for his positive test – but, remarkably, this was backdated to when he failed the test, not to when he actually stopped playing. In between failing the test and stopping playing, Shahzad played another 17 internationals; Afghanistan received no reprimand for selecting him in this period.
Andre Russell, among the world’s leading T20 players, was also banned in 2017. Russell was banned for a year for failing to file his whereabouts three times in a year with the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission, who accused Russell of ‘gross negligence’. Yet, after news broke of his missed tests early in 2016, Russell played on for 11 months – winning a raft of trophies, including the T20 World Cup, in the period, and earning in the region of £1 million. His treatment ‘does seem unusual compared to how athletes in other sports have been treated,’ said Paul Dimeo, a specialist in performance-enhancing drugs in sport. That such a high-profile player could play on for nearly a year after co
ntravening WADA requirements – and with his missed tests seldom remarked upon – suggested a sport oblivious to the threat of drugs. The apparent lack of interest from the media in cricket doping is not merely a semantic point; many successful investigations into doping in sport have been abetted by the media, as in The Sunday Times journalist David Walsh’s 15-year pursuit of Lance Armstrong.
But in recent years the trickle of doping cases in cricket has grown. In each year from 2014 to 2018, there were two, one, three, four and then six violations of the doping code detected either by the ICC or, most often, by domestic authorities. These results appeared to suggest that the risks of doping are growing.
‘You can look at cricket in the same way as golf in some ways because they’re modelled on spurious spirit and values and so on. There’s been this feeling that people will not cheat by doping in cricket and golf. That’s long past – you can’t utter that any longer. People take shortcuts where there’s money to be made, no matter what sport,’ Howman reflected. ‘The money that is now available in cricket is pretty formidable to what it was ten years ago. So you’re going to have temptation there. And if you look at the way that some cricketers have been tempted by those who groom players to engage in spot-fixing or match manipulation then the same sort of grooming can of course occur with doping.’ Just as with match-fixing, criminals could be enriched by doping – though this time to provide the drugs to help cricketers win, rather than pushing them to lose deliberately.
And – far more so than with match-fixing – would-be dopers have been abetted by the relative lack of scrutiny paid to the subject. ‘I don’t think it’s a world that has been explored properly,’ Howman said. Even when players would not actually benefit from a particular drug, they could easily be attracted to taking it by mistakenly thinking it brought physiological benefits. ‘My concern nowadays is not medical or physical, it’s psychological – people think by taking a pill they’re going to get better.’