Ban drug cheats for life, says Hackett
OLYMPIC 1500m champion Grant Hackett clashed twice yesterday with Australian IOC member Kevan Gosper after the swimmer called for lifetime bans for drug cheats.
In Beijing for the signing of a co-operation agreement between the Olympic committees of Australia and China, Hackett got personal about the issue, saying he may have lost swimming titles to drug cheats.
“If they have taken a steroid they should be banned for life,” Hackett said after a tour of the China Drug Control Centre. “If you are going to cheat in sport you should be banned for life.”
Centre deputy director Xu Youxuan said there would be 1000 more tests conducted at the Beijing 2008 Olympics than at the Athens Games.
Hackett said: “You must remember at this stage the drug cheaters are ahead of the drug tests.
“That is why we are really pushing to eradicate as many as we can.”
Mr Gosper immediately disagreed that lifetime bans were necessary.
He said the existing penalties were about right, and the Athens Games, at which 23 positive drug tests were recorded, showed the gap between the cheats and the tests was narrowing.
Hackett defended his hard line, saying he was coming from the perspective of someone who might have been in a situation where they raced against a drug cheat, which was hard to handle.
“Sometimes you can be deprived of a result because somebody else is cheating,” he said. Asked whether that had happened to him, Hackett said: “I can’t say because I don’t know. That is actually the hard thing.”
Mr Xu said that China conducted about 6000 drug tests a year, of which about 10 last year had returned positive for banned substances.
Hackett said the Chinese needed to be given the benefit of the doubt on drugs in sport. Earlier problems with drugs in swimming had earned the Chinese a bad reputation, but it was wrong to assume things had not changed.
The co-operation agreement between the committees provides for athlete exchanges and information swapping on anti-doping, among other issues.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.