EDITORIAL - Ms Shirley's misstep

Given Anne Shirley's background and presumed skills, plus the resources available to Sports Illustrated (SI), we would have expected a far more nuanced, and robustly argued, article than the one to which we were treated by Ms Shirley on the failings of the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission (JADCO).

Many Jamaicans may even surmise a deliberate SI distribution of a hatchet to a perhaps unwitting user to cleave at Jamaica's athletics programme. For the presumption globally now is that a Jamaican insider has blown the whistle on the island's institutional tolerance for cheating by its athletes. So, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) feels compelled to warn Jamaica of potentially grave consequences if it fails to put its house in order.

Usain Bolt, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, and the others who performed brilliantly at the IAAF's World Athletics Championships in Moscow cannot have escaped the splatter, whether it was intended for them, or not. We assume the latter.

Of course, Ms Shirley's insider status is unquestioned. She, up to the middle of the last decade, worked as a government adviser on sports and helped, Ms Shirley reports, to conceptualise JADCO, which she led for several months up to earlier this year.

Ms Shirley's employment to JADCO ended very publicly, apparently over her bad working relationship with staff.

This newspaper, like Ms Shirley, is critical of JADCO. We are especially concerned about its lack of transparency, which is largely a result of leaders who were fostered in a culture of official secrecy and who have not adapted to new ideas of governance.

This failure by JADCO to be open and frank about its developmental challenges and the economic stringency that accompanied its birth played into the hands of those who would wish to believe that Jamaica's prowess on the track was manufactured in modern versions of beakers, test tubes and Petri dishes rather than by genetics, effort and more than a century of athletic tradition.

But pinpointing JADCO's operational and cultural inadequacies is easy. The egregiousness of Ms Shirley's failing was the absence of the contextual relationship between the data she provided for drug testing by JADCO and its facilitation of cheating by Jamaican athletes.

Given Ms Shirley's background, and the specialised publication for which she wrote, it would have been good if she provided proportional comparisons between the testing data for Jamaica and those of other countries. A discussion of the adequacy of technologies for catching cheaters and their deployment globally would also have been useful.

The point is that the anti-doping efforts are not singular. Jamaica, as all who subscribe to WADA's regime, is part of a broad network designed to catch cheats wherever they operate.

For instance, Jamaica's elite athletes do not primarily ply their trade at home where they, presumably, can find protection. They perform abroad where they are subject to tests. New protocols such as blood testing and the laying down of biological markers which make it harder for athletes to cheat are, in this context, worthy of discussion.

The bottom line: While JADCO has much work to do to fix its problem and its image, neither this nor the infraction, proven and alleged, of some of our athletes is the basis, even unintended, to discredit the many.

In that respect, Ms Shirley, we believe, was too loose by half.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.