EDITORIAL- JADCO board should still go

We know little about Carey Brown, but according to Natalie Neita-Headley, the Cabinet minister with day-to-day responsibility for sports, he has "strong administrative and managerial skills".

We will take Mrs Neita-Headley at her word.

In that regard, we welcome Mr Brown's appointment as executive director of the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission (JADCO). He will assume duties this week, days ahead of the arrival of a team from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for an inspection of JADCO's dope-testing regime.

Another important development related to JADCO was last weekend's announcement by Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller that the CHASE Fund, the agency that is financed from gaming taxes, will provide J$7 million to JADCO to develop a website and for public education about drugs in sports.

These are examples, the Prime Minister says, that JADCO "is at work and working".

ONE MORE IMPORTANT TASK ... RESIGN

This newspaper does not question Mrs Simpson Miller's assessment. But having appointed an executive director, we believe that the JADCO directors have one more important task to accomplish. They should now resign en bloc to prevent the prime minister having to fire them. That would be an important move towards bringing credibility back to the agency and in repairing the image that has been unfairly damaged in global athletics. Much of the negative fallout could have been avoided if the situation had been competently handled by JADCO.

As we have made plain before, despite Anne Shirley's Sport Illustrated exposé about the absence of out-of-competition drug testing for several months before the London Olympics, we do not believe that Jamaica has a deep culture of cheating in athletics.

Indeed, where people have tested positive for banned substances it is not usually the case that infractions are linked to the domestic sports infrastructure.

ABSENCE OF GOOD JUDGEMENT

In any event, Shirley's piece in Sports Illustrated - in its absence of context and comparative data on the testing of Jamaica's elite athletes at home and abroad - hardly reflects the quality of journalism we expected a publication of global repute to set for itself. Or, maybe in this case it got the job done.

But what may be perceived as a hatchet job cut deeper than it need have, because of JADCO's own posture: its absence of transparency and culture of secrecy when it had little, or nothing to hide. Where it has problems and what was being done to fix them could easily have been stated.

Instead, the agency responded with arrogance and hubris, a result, we believe, that is ill-attuned to the new norms of governance and wedded to old civil service concepts of management, including the primacy of the Official Secrets Act.

But the JADCO board's more egregious behaviour was its recent to-and-froing with WADA over when their team could come to Jamaica. With Jamaica's reputation at stake, it should have been JADCO insisting that the sooner the better, instead of giving the impression of stalling for time.

Whoever was responsible showed an absence of good judgement. Ultimately, the JADCO board is accountable and should be held to account, or be made to do so.

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.