EDITORIAL - JADCO must respond with data

We confess to being more than a little bit perplexed that it took so long after the revelation of her positive test for a banned substance for Veronica Campbell-Brown to speak to the issue. That, however, was her right.

What Mrs Campbell-Brown has now caused to be said on her behalf is not an obviously compelling and exculpatory statement that the vast majority would have hoped for. But two important points were made: that she wouldn't knowingly take a banned substance and that she will work to clear her name.

It is now for an honest and transparent process of adjudication to take place and for the truth to emerge. The chips, then, must fall where they may. For what is at stake is larger than Mrs Campbell-Brown; it is the integrity of Jamaica's athletic programme and ensuring that it is not subject to, and sullied by, unfair and unwarranted attacks.

Indeed, athletics is one of the few things that Jamaica really, at this time, has going for it - in which it is a global leader.

But what is often missed in the glitter of performances by Jamaican athletes at international games is the more than a century of organised effort upon which those achievements, in part, rest.

DEFAULT POSITION

It is easy, in the circumstance, for the Dick Pounds of the world, having eschewed the context, to be suspicious that a country as small as Jamaica produces so many great athletes at the same time. Their default position is that Jamaica must be cheating.

Hence, the claim by Mr Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, that Jamaica's drug-testing programme is not sufficiently robust and that our athletes are hard to track for random tests. The Veronica Campbell-Brown issue, for Mr Pound, is swill into which to wallow.

The response to Mr Pound and like-minded persons can't be merely righteous indignation and an assertion of our integrity. We have to answer, too, with empirical data. The latter has been the weakness of the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission (JADCO).

JADCO a testament to JA's integrity

That Jamaica, five years ago, passed legislation to bring JADCO into existence was a declaration of the island's support for the fight against cheating in sports and a willingness to hold its own athletes to account. That commitment is further underlined by the J$63.4 million allocated to JADCO to do its work this fiscal year, in the face of the Government's fiscal crisis and the International Monetary Fund programme that demands economic austerity.

JADCO's officials insist that they maintain in- and out-of-competition testing of athletes who fall under its jurisdiction and say that their efforts have also produced adverse findings. They note, too, that most Jamaicans who test positive for drugs are not the ones who train at home.

What JADCO has, so far, failed to do is provide statistical analyses of its testing programme, generally, and say how often Jamaica's elite athletes are tested. Nor has it provided us with statistical comparisons between its efforts of other anti-doping agencies.

Such data cannot be hard to collate. JADCO must do it as a matter of urgency, prepared to fix any gaps its findings might reveal. There would be no shame in that.

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