Trust and Risk In Sports | Professor Richard McLaren

Dani Ng-See-Quan: In 1983, officials from the Soviet Union sent detailed plans to the head of their national Track and Field team. Those plans outlined which performance enhancing drugs should be taken in what quantities, and at what intervals, to ensure their dominance at the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Top athletes would need oral steroid tablets in addition to three different steroid injections. The officials who provided the doping plan stated that they had supplies of the drugs on hand at the Research Institute of Physical Culture and Sports in Moscow.

Famously, the Soviet Union boycotted the LA Games in 1984, so it’s unclear if that plan was ever put into motion. But, according to the New York Times—who obtained these documents back in 2016—it shows how organized and results-oriented so-called amateur athletics were, even back then.

International competition, and the Olympic Games in particular, have always been about more than just who gets across the finish line first or who can jump the furthest… throughout history they’ve been proxy battlegrounds where nations have tried their best to assert their dominance.

Like they say… winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

So, with the stakes being so high - you know, a nation’s identity on the line - it makes a certain amount of sense that some players would look to win at all costs. Even if it means breaking the rules.

Hi I’m Dani Ng See-Quan, and this time on Trust Faster I’m joined by one of the foremost figures in the world of anti-doping research and enforcement, Prof. Richard McLaren.

Prof. McLaren rose to prominence on the international sporting stage more than twenty years ago, when he was commissioned to investigate and report on steroid use by American track athletes at the 2000 Sidney Olympics.

Since then he’s continued to investigate drug use in the Olympics as well as Major League Baseball, and professional cycling, to name only a few. He founded McLaren Global Sports Solutions in 2014 to consult with sporting organizations on ethics, doping, and enforcement.

More recently, you might’ve seen Prof McLaren in the 2017 Netflix documentary, Icarus, a film about the vast scale of doping in Amateur sports.

So, given the opportunity to talk to someone with this unbelievable amount of experience and expertise… I really wanted to focus on the big picture. In the world of Sports Integrity, what are the challenges facing regulators, and what can be done to improve the current system? And what’s standing in the way?

Prof. McLaren says that a big part of the problem is that the governing bodies and organizations like WADA - the World Anti-Doping Agency - are always one step behind.

Professor Richard McLaren: The people who want to cheat, who are deliberately cheating, study carefully all the different scientific information that's available as to what might be a suitable substance for their particular sport. Because a substance that builds strength ah may not be what's required for the particular athlete in the type of competition they're engaged in.

They may need to have endurance, for example. We're generating out of the pharmaceutical industry literally hundreds of new drugs every day. ah and they The drugs that are being produced in pharmaceutical company are aren't being produced for performance enhancing purposes for athletes.

But so there found by the athlete though and start to be used by the athletes and then that word spreads amongst those that are cheating about that and so the use of the substance grows and at some point water gets a hold of the idea that this particular new substance is going on then you have to develop a test for it so I don't think you ever catch up. And I also think you can never eliminate performance enhancing cheating. ah But you can reduce it and you can control it. ah And that's really as far as we can ever get.

The given the knowledge and scientific information and testing systems that we have, ah we're always going to be one step behind the latest, newest versions of some drug that may enhance sporting performance, but wasn't developed for that purpose at all.

DNSQ: I think it’s important to understand what the current system is in order to understand how cumbersome it’s become — both for governing bodies and for the athletes themselves.

Obviously different sports and different governing bodies have different rules, as do different countries — but broadly speaking for something like the Olympics, there’s in-competition testing and out-of-competition testing. In-competition testing might be mandatory for the top three finishers, but might also include random participants as well. For some countries, every athlete who’s eligible to compete at the Games has to opt-in to randomized out-of-competition testing leading up to the event.

Athletes are alerted that they’re going to be tested—this means that sometimes they have to travel with very little notice—they give blood and urine samples, the samples go to a lab… and hopefully the presence of any PEDs are detected and fair play is maintained.

In some cases, there might be something called a biological passport that acts as a record of an athlete’s baseline blood chemistry so that any suspicious changes can be flagged.

It’s an extremely resource intensive process… by some estimates the cost per violation detected is over $180K USD. And far more violations are going undetected than being caught in the current system.

And, worst of all, it basically treats every single athlete like a potential suspect.

For Prof. McLaren, it’s frustrating to see so much inefficiency.

RM: The labs around the world don't report a very high positive ratio. It’s the number of samples analyzed versus ah ones that are actually deemed to contain some kind of performance enhancing substance ah is less than half of 1%.

On average across the world's different accredited laboratories. ah Why is that? Because we know that the problem is much more extensive than that when you read the sociological surveys, studies and so forth that indicate that maybe up to one quarter or possibly higher than 25% of competing athletes, or have in the past or are using a performance enhancing drug. And yet we don't turn those up when we go through this very expensive system of regulation and identification.

I think the inefficiencies lie primarily in the fact that the testing is not at a targeted basis that it really needs to be. ah so it tends to be let's do the quantity, the number of tests, but not necessarily which are the people who should be most frequently tested. ah that So you know if you're in the marketing business, you target your audience and then you try and design your marketing ah process to that audience.

That's also intended to be the way the World Anti-Doping Agency and code works, but in fact, it's really not target testing. It's just random testing, maybe some idea that there's some reason why I'm going to pursue a particular individual.

And the other problem is it's very inefficient to just do testing at competitions. I think you have to have competition testing. Otherwise, people would continue to use performance handling drugs on a wider scale than they already do at various competitions, right up to the Olympic type of games, but any kind of world meet of any kind. So the testing is a very inefficient, ineffective process and it needs to be looked at with some foresight to figure out a much quicker, easier, better way to do it. And they've they're working on that.

DNSQ: Prof McLaren sees potential in technologies like voice analytics to help make the system less antagonistic for athletes and more efficient for regulators, simply by flagging potential risks and not mis-directing resources toward continually testing clean athletes.

These technologies are not a panacea, but could be a valuable tool in the fight against doping.

RM: Voice analytics is really just a tool. The result of the use of that tool is you can get an assessment that somebody is a high risk of using a performance enhancing drug. But then you need follow-up. You need to go and do an interview. You may need to also take a sample or you may need to take a download of a phone ah in order to confirm that something more than just a risk, the person is actually engaged in yeah using a performance-answering drug.

So It's a very useful tool because ah there are a lot of people who would come out of a voice analytics test and be low risk. ah So why spend your money? Going back to the marketing analogy, you wouldn't try to make your advertising ah responsive to the most infrequent fringe user of whatever the product is. And if you go and take urine and blood samples from someone who's very low risk, you're probably just wasting your money. The tool could be used to refine the group of people who are being tested.

One of the most glaring failures of the current WADA anti-doping code is, if you read the provisions, almost every other provision in the code says that you have to follow up with investigations, whether you're a national anti-doping agency, a sport or a club, and that's not being done. you know they So the rules say there's going to be investigations all the time about all sorts of things, which in fact never occur. And that's gnawing a way at the trust that the athletes have of the system.

That's an improvement that we should follow through with and stop just going through the motions of putting it in the rules and then never doing it. What else could improve the process? This voice analytics tool that we've been using in some of our investigation work has a direct application in anti-doping as well as in manipulation of sporting events and so on um because it enables you to focus on a much narrower group of people who are are the bad actors

Let me give you one illustration. We were asked to look into a basketball team that was seemingly, as a team, fixing the endgame spread between winner and loser.

And so there are 13 athletes, we have to investigate them. If you do the traditional interviewing type of technique investigation, that would probably take you, you could perhaps do two a day. So that's like, say it would take about a week to do it properly with two investigators.

We used the voice analytical tool. We had them all answer it. We came up with three high positive, high risk individuals. Then one of them had just recently joined the team. We made the decision. Turned out we were wrong on this in the end, but we made the decision at the time while he's just joined, he's probably not involved or doesn't know very much. And we'll just get delved into the other two.

Then with the other two, we focused on them and we downloaded their phones and got other information and then analyzed that. And we were then able to identify quite clearly that they were involved in, they were the ones that were doing the manipulation of the spread. And then the third one, who was high risk, who said he denied it and we let him off. We didn't follow up with him because he'd only joined a few weeks before that particular club.

Came to us about three or four months later and confirmed what our tool had told us that he was high-risk. He admitted to being indirectly involved and knowing a lot about it. And that let ten other people never have to go through anything but a five-minute discussion on the phone answering some questions with yes and no answers.

DNSQ: One huge by-product of streamlining regulation and enforcement would be increased trust between athletes and regulators.

And, according to Prof. McLaren, trust is an essential part of making the whole thing work.

RM: Oh, trust is extremely important. I mean, you want people to have confidence in the system. ah So they have to trust that the people running the system are doing so with integrity. And that they that's right down to the doping control officer who's the first person point of contact with the athlete ah when you're doing the testing. and So trust is fundamental.

What again a voice analytics tool can help build a stronger. Feeling of trust because those that are coming out low risk.

athletes know whether they're cheating or not. ah And if they are low risk and so are all their friends low risk, that builds a feeling of camaraderie and trust in the system ah and gives them confidence that if somebody is cheating, they're likely to get caught. Right now, I think a lot of competing athletes at the top level don't feel that they have that confidence and trust. They're a little uncertain or they may be even more negative than that, just don't have that trust of the system at all.

Athletes don't really trust their sporting organizations necessarily or the anti-doping procedures that are involved in sport and they're very suspicious of the people they call the suits, which is pretty much anybody who's an administrator or a doping control officer or whatever. Sport too often tries to keep things out of the public eye. This problem with the Chinese swimmers, the 23 of whom tested positive for a prohibited substance in a very low level of concentration or amount which was then a subject, and still is to this moment, a subject of dispute between both the World Anti-Doping Agency and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and and if some of the other people are getting caught and in the crossfire.

That's one of the problems that we see a lot of. Different organizations don't cooperate very effectively. So what's the role there of WADA? Are they the regulator? Or are they the protector of sport or the protector of the athletes? I think they would say the last, but from time to time I think they act in their own interest and I think that's true of a lot of sporting organizations. So the processes in anti-doping are not really considered to be fair.

Athletes complain about the need to be available on a certain day at 6am. There's a good reason for that because the testing of certain substances, if you don't catch it within the first 12 hours, then you won't find it in the urine sample because the urine sample is just the disposal system of the body and so there are only remnants of it in there anyway. I mean that's why they went from blood urine samples to blood samples to get a more accurate perspective on certain types of drugs that are being used, but blood doesn't show up in everything. Urine shows up many things that blood doesn't show up. So the process - they've been improved, but I think the athletes don't trust the system and they don't trust how it's administered. They don't think it's done fairly. Sometimes it favors particular athletes, favors a particular sport, favors a particular country, so they're suspicious about it. One of the ways that we've tried to fix that in part is to create athletes' commissions and have them have some role in the decision-making process of sporting organizations.

The problem with that is athletes are focused on being athletes and being very good at their sport. They don't really have the additional time to be in a sports administration atmosphere and talk to and work on changing rules and improving the administrative aspects of doping controls or any other issues. and Particularly that's true of safeguarding issues as well.

DNSQ: Prof. McLaren was quick to point out that the scale of international sports has gotten bigger, and bigger, and bigger… to the point that today we regularly hear about multi-million dollar contracts for athletes, and multi-billion dollar contracts for broadcasters.

So as you might expect, as sports has become an economic goliath, the siren song of… ethical shortcuts, let’s say, has only grown stronger.

As more money comes into play, there’s a kind of ricochet effect happening. It’s not like a sneaker company is directly paying an athlete to cheat… but they might be offering big enough endorsement deals that an athlete might start to think about cheating in order to get the win that secures a lucrative contract.

One surprising thing that I learned from Prof McLaren is that when it comes to doping, a lot of the governing bodies that regulate certain sports haven’t always been gung ho about going after cheaters.

To hear him tell it, they’ve been less motivated by a sense of ethics or moral duty to the sport than they have been by the reality of brand management.

RM: The sports sponsors want the stars to be involved in competing and if you start taking them out because they're using performance enhancing drugs then that affects the viewership or the audience.

And that then it affects the trust that the sponsor has in the whole anti-doping procedure and process. And so they have a big stake in that the system is operating properly and not affecting athletes the way it is currently. So the sponsors could do a lot more to help ah by putting more into the education side of performance enhancing drug education across the globe.

I think over time though the sports have come to realize that you can't have a truly fair competitive system if you have athletes that are on performance-enhancing drugs. So in today's world, even the sporting organizations don't try and hide things the way they may have done or did do in the period before 2012. So they had significant reasons not to be very robust in how they regulated doping controls, but they've gradually changed that attitude and now they are much more rigorous about it and you see a lot of professional athletes getting caught for performance drugs and and and suffering suspensions. The controversy is more over the length of suspensions when you deal with professional athletes in North America versus the rest of the world in say soccer in Europe or other other types of professional sports where the sanctions can be years whereas it's a handful of games in the professional leagues in North America. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about baseball or hockey or any of them.

So that's the adverse effect, I think, on the sporting organizations. And they really do not want to lose their stars to doping interactions if that can possibly be avoided. I hate that attitude still exists, but they don't try and prevent it from becoming public the way they did in the past.

DNSQ: I mentioned at the top of the show that Prof McLaren was part of the Oscar-winning documentary, Icarus. I bring it up again here because of a story Prof McLaren told me during our conversation - it's a story that I think really drives home the stakes of sports integrity enforcement… and not just in a kind of abstract fair play sense.

The work that Prof McLaren does? It can be dangerous.

RM: So they made this film. I was in it. I went to the Oscars. It was the very first time. It was 2018. Netflix had never been a significant force in the Academy Awards. And so we all thought, well, but there's no way we're going to win that particular Oscar for Best Documentary. So I arrived with some of the crew that did the film. And I was approached by a couple of officials and said, we don't want you to be in the auditorium, because there's some risk.

[Now there's always security for a public event like that, but it was over the top security.]

In order to get to the theater that particular year, you had to go around parked police, parked tanks with water guns on the turrets and a huge amount of security. So there was some other concern and I was just a piece of that because of the work, my work was connected to Russia and they asked me if I would not go into the auditorium and go elsewhere. So I, what I did is I went to Elton John's party and had a great time there and probably had a better time than had I been in the nosebleed seats at the top of the auditorium in the Academy Awards. And of course Icarus did win the Oscar for best documentary that year.

DNSQ: I think it’s important to point out here that these aren’t just vague or theoretical concerns.

Following the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, a number of journalism outlets published reports alleging that Russia had organized and overseen an incredibly sophisticated, state-sponsored doping program.

Imagine the Soviet plans from 1983… but with three decades of technological innovation, medical science, and the internet behind them.

So, Prof McLaren was commissioned by WADA to investigate and deliver a report on these allegations.

RM: There was a lot of pressure placed on me. I was of the view that what was going on was a state-sponsored system in Russia. ah which I still hold that view very strongly to this day. In fact, subsequent events have borne that out. But there was a lot of pressure put on me to not label it as such. ah But I resisted that pressure and I put it in the reports and I put it the in any press conferences that I had.

So, yeah, there was a lot of that sort of pressure on the part of the sport. I was also given a very short timeframe in which to report. The very first report was done in 53 days, which is incredibly short for an investigation of the level and sophistication of the one that we had to carry out.

DNSQ: One of the central issues in his investigation was whether or not it was actually possible to tamper with urine samples that were being kept in containers that were supposed to be tamper-proof.

RM: In the process, we had to be able to prove that you could take the tops off these urine containers that athletes provide, and then put them back on without showing that they'd been taken off. And because otherwise the whole idea that there was swapping of samples at Sochi couldn't have occurred. um So ah there was a lot of there's always a lot of pressure, there's always a lot of people trying to push you in certain directions and you have to you have to follow your instincts and follow what your terms of reference are and what you think needs to be done and what needs to be said and to stand up to that.

DNSQ: That pressure can be political, but it can also be more direct… and terrifying.

RM: One of our very capable assistants who speaks five languages was working with the lab that we were using in London, England, the UK, and left very late at night and was followed, got on the tube to go back to where she was staying at the time. And somebody got on board and pulled out a book with Russian. It was Cyrillic, so yeah it's a very different language and very different alphabet. She knew immediately what it was. Sat across from her and started reading. Got off at the next station but left the book on the seat. Someone else got on the train at the next station and picked up the book and started reading it. At that point, she got very nervous about what was going on.

She was at one of those stops on the tube in the UK in London ah where there's a spiral staircase and there's also lifts that you can go up to the street level in and she decided maybe I better take the lift because there'll be other people with me in the lift and I'll be safer. She got to the top from the lift and the same person who'd come out and picked up the book was just standing up leaning against the pole with the book. She ran down the street to a hotel. They got the place involved and the man disappeared.

But that was, that's the kind of intimidation. Yeah, that ah kind of intimidating so intimidation was done a number of times to myself and others in the organization. It really shook her. And we put on some extra security. We got some great help from security forces in the UK to make sure that that didn't happen again. Although you can never guarantee that something could happen.

DNSQ: So, Prof. McLaren has been at the forefront of anti-doping and sports integrity for over two decades. And, with the benefit of all that experience, he believes that there has to be a better way forward for all involved.

For the sake of athletes who want fair competition without feeling unduly scrutinized or under suspicion… and for the sake of governing sports bodies who are spending millions of dollars on drug testing programs that by all accounts, are less than 1% effective.

Ultimately, Prof McLaren believes that to get things under control you have to start with a more holistic approach to athlete conduct.

It can’t just be about what happens on the field of play.

RM: I think you have to start with code of conduct and have very specific codes of conduct. And we're starting to see, for example, professional athletes who misbehave not on the playing field, not within the sport, but within their own social personal life. And they abuse the opposite sex. um They engage in conduct that of all sorts is not appropriate and now sports are actually starting to say that all off the playing field and and not really within the sport directly affects everybody's image about the sport and about you and about the club and so we're going to do something about it we're going to give you some discipline so we're starting to move towards a more complete or holistic approach to the whole operation of sport.

How do you get an ideal organization? I think, first of all, you have to have people with complete personal integrity and then you have to make sure that they operate entirely within whatever the set rules are and the rules are ones which are appropriate for either conduct or control of coaching or control of using prohibited substances through therapeutic use exemptions. It's hard to conceive of a perfect sporting organization when we don't have perfect governmental systems and we don't have perfect government countries.

Everybody's struggling to be better than they have been, but nobody's near an ideal situation. But I think we're moving in the right direction in terms of taking a much broader view of it's not just the athlete on a competition field or in the event. There's a lot more to it and a lot more things need to be taken account of in order to run an effective organization. and make sure that everybody is treated equally, fairly and consistently whether they be athletes or spectators or the administrators of the sport or the officials.