Intelligence, data networks important tools to combat cheating

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – Sports regulatory bodies are increasingly focusing their efforts on the use of intelligence and data networks to root out illegal drug use and cheating, according to speakers on Thursday at the Asian Racing Conference, a development that poses challenges to racing’s current reliance on post-race and out-of-competition drug tests to combat doping.

Panelists at the morning session – which included regulatory officials for horseracing in Britain and Australia, plus a sports-regulation legal expert and the top regulatory official for world track-and-field events – stressed that all sports face an ongoing challenge of maintaining integrity, and they also acknowledged that individuals who are committed to cheating are likely to succeed, at least at first. But they also stressed that robust intelligence and testing programs, combined with sanctions that act as deterrents, should limit the number of individuals who attempt to cheat in the first place.

“If enforcement isn’t strong enough, the potential pool of cheaters just grows and grows and grows,” said Brett Clothier, the head of the Athletic Integrity Unit, which monitors the top-level athletes in international track-and-field events and marathons. The AIU was formed five years ago after a scandal ripped through the sport and necessitated a different approach to combating cheating, Clothier said.

That different approach, according to Clothier, relies far less on post-event drug tests than on coordinated intelligence-gathering efforts designed to best identify the athletes that are most likely to be breaking the rules. And that is a strategy that more and more sports regulatory bodies are using, Clothier said.

“It’s very clear that testing does not work,” Clothier said. “It’s very, very hard to catch determined, well-resourced cheats, with a testing process that is essentially random. The doping substances are very hard to detect. The athletes use micro-dosing to evade detection.”

For the AIU, that means consolidating data from a multitude of sources, including social media, betting data, testing info, confidential sources, and more. The data is then analyzed by a core group of specialists at the organization, in order to generate leads into whether a specific athlete under the organization’s jurisdiction may be cheating. (The AIU has a total of about 500 Olympic-level athletes and 300 marathoners under its jurisdiction, Clothier said in a follow-up interview)

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“You have to bring all that unstructured data into something you can work with,” Clothier said.

For racing in the U.S., such an effort would present a challenge. Regulatory efforts in the U.S. are coordinated through state racing commissions, which have jurisdiction over all the licensees operating in the state. In most cases, those efforts rely on post-race and out-of-competition tests that can adequately detect hundreds of regulated or prohibited substances. (Most racing commissions also employ investigators, many of whom play critical roles in policing efforts.)

While that focus is partly due to the sport’s historical approach to regulation, it is also seemingly necessary because of the prevalence of betting on racing. Sports outside of racing might be able to get away without testing the winners of every competition held under their jurisdiction, from the top to the bottom, but it is extremely difficult to believe that U.S. race fans and, crucially, bettors, would accept that the winner of each and every race held in the U.S. is not sent to the test barn, not without some transformation in how the sport is policed that would inspire a radical change in confidence.

Annamarie Phelps, a former Olympic rower who is now the chair of the British Horseracing Authority and the vice chair of the British Olympic Association, said that regulatory agencies now must use a “multi-layered” approach to combat cheating, using contacts and relationships with other agencies or racing organizations that might have access to data or tools that could aid policing efforts. And she also called for strict adherence to ethical rules among regulators, as well as a commitment to protecting the sport’s participants.

“We could risk losing the support or the neutrality of most of our community if we are perceived as corrupt or if gambling or betting is seen as toxic,” Phelps said, using a term, “social license,” that has become prevalent among regulators, advocates, and activists to describe an industry’s acceptance by the public.

All of the panelists agreed that racing and sports in general could do much better in providing a better environment to protect potential whistleblowers, which have figured prominently in recent scandals involving the suppression of positive drug-test results among Russian athletes that have resulted in more than a hundred medals being stripped from the country’s athletes.

Jack Anderson, the director of sports law at the University of Melbourne, said that the sports and business communities do not do an adequate job of protecting whistleblowers. But he also said that the insularity of most sporting communities, including racing, provides special challenges, which therefore requires special protections.

“The sports community is small, and the smaller the community, the louder they hear you whistle,” Anderson said.

The panel concluded with a discussion on the proper source of funding for regulatory bodies. While all agreed that it would be best for a non-involved actor to provide the funding, such as the government, they all also agreed that such a goal was entirely unrealistic. As a result, most agreed that regulatory agencies would need to be funded by a mix of industry and non-industry sources, with the regulatory agencies drafting strict bylaws to protect themselves from undue influence.

“If we were relying on government funding, we’d have no funding,” Clothier said.

Panel discusses wagering transparency

The opening panel was followed by a brief discussion among participants in a special task force set up by the Asian Racing Federation to study threats to wagering pools and the sport’s integrity. The presentation focused almost exclusively on an unregulated internet-based exchange-wagering company, Citibet, that matches billions of dollars a year in wagers on races held in the region and elsewhere, with the largest shares on racing in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, and Singapore.

Members of the task force said their largest concern about Citibet was that its betting records are entirely opaque, unlike some other betting exchanges that operate in the region. As a result, the task force members said any bets on a fixed race in their jurisdictions have most likely migrated to Citibet, with no way for regulators to examine evidence that a horse’s connections had deliberately held a horse in a race in order to back the horse to lose on the exchange.

“It’s given us pause about what might really be happening,” said Brant Dunshea, the chief regulatory officer of the British Horseracing Authority. “We’ve seen some questionable rides [in Britain], but no evidence on the regulated markets.”

Tim Robinson, the general manager of Intelligence and Integrity Services at Racing Victoria in Australia, said that racing companies and regulatory agencies will need to reach out to multiple law-enforcement agencies, both local and international, to attack a problem that is likely to be difficult to stamp out in an era when the world is seemingly reluctant to accept tight regulation over internet activities.

“It’s global, it’s complex, and there’s not one simple answer to fix it,” Robinson said. “So it needs to have a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional, multi-faceted approach to fix it.”