The WADA and Cricket: In Search of Clarity on Drug Testing

Over at Cricinfo, Mukul Kesavan pens a very good, balanced take on the current triangular dispute between the World Anti-Doping Agency, the International Cricket Council, and the Board of Cricket Control in India.  There are plenty of reasons why this current dispute  over whether the whereabouts clause is unduly burdensome on players  is interesting and important.

The first and most obvious one is that it will bring some sanity to the current out-of-season testing regime, which is not perfect, and needs considerable tweaking. Secondly, it should produce some reasoned discussion about the role of performance enhancing drugs in cricket.

Unlike baseball, cricket has not suffered a soul-scarring scrape with performance enhancing drugs. Instead, the two drugs most commonly associated with cricket remain alcohol and marijuana. The former, just because so much of it is consumed at cricket grounds and because every once in a while, a current cricket player provides a couple of news-cycles worth of entertainment by getting catastrophically drunk in public. The latter (besides being consumed at cricket grounds, albeit not openly) allows cricket administrators to fully display their ability to be sanctimonious hypocrites as they haul up cricket players (adults) who have the gall to smoke a joint in private.

Cricket has been tainted by gambling, but there is no Bonds-Canseco-Sosa scandal in cricket. There are obvious candidates who might benefit from a cocktail of PE drugs: fast bowlers recovering from injuries, or striving to find that extra yard of pace being the prime ones. Unsurprisingly, the two cricketers nailed for PE drugs were fast bowlers: the Pakistani pair of Mohammed Asif and Shoaib Akhtar. That case was handled in spectacularly, but not surprisingly, incompetent fashion by the Pakistan Cricket Board, which suggested that it cared little for procedural or substantive niceties when it came to drugs in sport. The accusations of “drug cheat” that followed were tempered by the fact that both players had self-destructed in other ways.  Their continued participation in the world of cricket would have been just as divisive as the baseball BALCO scandal.

Cricket has been lucky thus far. It needs to get its act in gear when it comes to drug testing. But there needs to be a way forward that finds a happy mean between the quasi-inquisitory mode adopted by the WADA and the concerns it expresses, and the desire of professional players, especially the high-flying ones, to not have their freedoms restricted at all by sports regulatory authorities.  And we still need clarity on which kinds of drugs, and how, affect player performances to deliver an unfair edge,  and furthermore, are likely to create health hazards with their continued usage.

The wrinkle in this case is that the players’ stand has been taken by the BCCI, the most powerful, and thus the most despised entity in world cricket. This has led to some predictable knee-jerkery about the absolute abuses of absolute power and so on.  Admittedly, there is plenty of power on display; it just isn’t all the BCCI’s.