Dick Pound Loses Bid to Be Sport’s Top Judge
Posted April 5, 2008 at 07:00 AM by Michael J. Sedor
Section: Culture/History, Socio-Political, Featured Writers, Michael Sedor, Doping
World peace announced. Complete loan forgiveness for all credit card holders. Michael Sedor (that’s me) named to Olympic team. What other news could bring an equivalent smile to this writer’s face? How about this one from the International Herald Tribune: “Mino Auletta elected president of Court of Arbitration for Sport, defeating Dick Pound”. Am I exaggerating, being a little hyperbolic? Perhaps, but any Dick Pound defeat is a victory for the sports world.
During his tenure as president of the World Anti-Doping Administration, which ended last year, Pound threw drug accusations at any athlete who looked at him the wrong way...and perhaps even a few that smiled at him. He reigned with one self-righteous, intractable philosophy: the athlete is guilty before proven innocent. The result of his Draconian and arbitrary sentencing was, among other things, the inescapable sullying and perhaps death of the sport of cycling, a pox on the great career of Lance Armstrong, an overwhelming and unnecessary drug-testing paranoia that has enveloped amongst all sporting competitors as well as public indignation and distrust towards sports in general.
Pound and his “continual injurious and biased comments” are now facing a lawsuit from the International Cycling Union which will be decided in a Swiss Court. I only wish that Pound would have unleashed his bilious, unsubstantiated, attacking rants against athletes in British papers because then he would be facing stricter libel laws. The future will see what the Swiss Court decides. Until then Pound assures us that he will run for the CAS presidency again in 2010 and he surely won’t stop speaking his mind, slander or not.
Just last week he ran off these bon mots to the BarbadosNation News: “There is no question about it, there is a suspicion out there. The difficulties over the years with all of the disclosures, the Montgomerys and the Gatlins and so forth, is that you start to look at everybody running fast and wonder if they are on drugs.” Again, guilty until proven innocent. You run fast? That means you are on drugs. This darkly pessimistic (he would surely say realistic) and harshly medieval world view can do nothing but harm. It’s a fear mongering witch-trial mentality that has and will create more problems. It’s a spiraling black hole of distrust that will kill any sport that it touches. It infantilizes athletes and forces upon them a suspicious mindset that broadcasts a simple message: “if you don’t do drugs then you won’t be as fast as your competitor who is surely doing drugs.”
Later next month on May 28, the same Court of Arbitration for Sport that Pound aimed to head will hear the drug-ban appeal of banned 100-meter sprint champ Justin Gatlin. But on March 26 Pound had already made his decision concerning Gatlin’s case and felt the need to announce it to the BarbadosNation News! I’m unclear of the conflict of interest or legal ethics ramifications, all I know is that somewhere Justin must be relieved at the notion that he might get a fair hearing and may be reinstated. I too am relieved that fairness, sanity, and modern legal practices and philosophies might be returning to the sporting world and I am hopeful that Mino Auletta’s victory is a definitive step in the further marginalization of Dick Pound.