Contador and The Need for Speed
On the day the CAS handed down its decision on the Contador case Cadel Evans was quoted in the cycling press repeating two of the institutional mantras of professional cycling. The first being that often claimed by the UCI and by others such as Lance Armstrong that the sport is at the forefront in the battle against drugs: “Cycling has done more than enough to show it’s doing the right things when it comes to the fight against drugs … Now it’s time for other sports to look to cycling and replicate what we do so the fight against drugs in sports can maybe be beaten one day across all sports.”
Evans was reported as saying that he had followed the Contador case from afar and trusted the authorities to do their job: “I don’t know all that goes on behind there and what all the real facts are and so on … I go along and do my job and that’s up for the authorities to decide”.
The other received wisdom about the Contador case which Evans repeated related to the claim that the Contador case took too long and in effect as others have said, thus created uncertainty for the sport: “It was a case that dragged on for so long I had no idea what was going on and what was going to happen. … I just read the newspapers like the rest of us.” This received wisdom that the case was a drawn out affair has even been repeated by academics in their commentary on the case.
As I have considered when discussing Operacion Puerto (see Hardie 2011), the rhetoric of need for speed in deciding doping cases was deeply embedded in the manner in which that case was played out in the sporting media spectacle – tardy Spanish justice was too slow and stood in the way of the certainty required for the sport and its sponsors; in such a situation the sovereign justice system of Spain had to be avoided and alternative methods of new law had to take their place. Alejandro Valverde’s case where the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) could adjudge a Spanish citizen for offences that allegedly occurred on Spanish territory despite rulings of a superior Spanish Court and on the basis of a matrix of circumstantial evidence not entirely related to the issue at hand is the prime example of this.
The legal scholar Wiiliam E. Scheuerman has written extensively on the danger of this need for legal speed, which he says jeopardizes freedom and undermines the rule of law. He argues that the motorisation of the law, it increasing use of technical and scientific standards undermines traditional legal reasoning: “law making procedures become ever faster and more circumscribed, the path towards the achievement of legal regulation shorter, and the share of jurisprudence smaller” (2009:105).
In the world of anti-doping and professional cycling this requirement for speed manifests itself in an avoidance of the tardy processes of national law courts and a preference for arbitration, it promotes a situation where of presumed guilt and judgment through the media is the norm rather than traditional methods of legal determination. Furthermore the principle of strict liability means that the only recourse available is of a formal procedural type.
Putting aside all the other issues at play in Contador’s case – and I am not entering into the question of whether he is guilty or not; was it really the drawn out affair that the received wisdom says it was – did it really take that long?
The Contador case from the point at which it became public in late September 2010 until the decision of CAS spans a period of sixteen months. This period includes the opening of the case, the hearing and decision by the Spanish cycling federation, and the preparation and hearing of the appeal in CAS, along with the time it took the three arbitrators to write their 98 page and 514 paragraphed decision. Given the complexity of the case, the evidence adduced and the maze of scientific and legal issues at stake is it really fair or accurate to describe this as a drawn out affair.
What has been at stake in the Contador case is not only Contador’s reputation as a doper or not (remember there is considerable ambiguity in the CAS decision as to whether Contador intentionally doped), but his name on the record books of the 2010 Tour de France and the 2011 Giro d’Italia. Along with this the UCI is seeking fines under its rules from Contador which amount to €2,485,000, the CAS has yet to decide upon this aspect of the case. Bloomberg News has put the potential financial cost of the case to Contador as being in the vicinity of US$6 million based upon an assessment of the fine and legal costs. But this figure does not seem to take into account the ramifications for Contador’s earnings this year nor his potential loss of sponsorship.
Would we really state that an investigation, court hearing and appeal process was tardy and drawn out if what was at stake was a wealthy entrepreneur who had their reputation trashed, was exposed to being banned from performing their business and exposed to a $3,000,000 fine amongst other significant financial losses?
And would we accept the decision of the Court as being just when in the end their decision leaves considerable doubt as to their reasoning based upon the evidence and as to whether Contador intentionally doped?
Given what was at issue for him I am not sure we would. If we judge it by traditional legal standards and the length of most court cases in our legal system, the Contador’s case was definitely not drawn out.
See Also:
Hardie, M., It’s not about the blood: Operacíon Puerto and the end of modernity, In McNamee, M. And Møller, V (eds) (2011) Doping and Anti-Doping Policy in Sport: Ethical and Legal Perspectives, Abingdon: Routledge.
Scheuerman, W.E., & Rosa, H., (2009) High-Speed Society, Social Acceleration, Power, and modernity, The Pennsylvania State University Press.
A number of academic critics of the global neoliberal system have observed in recent times that in fact the neoliberal is a zombie system, and that in this respect we are governed by a model which embodies the dead walking. Similarly, the focus on the ‘personality’ clash within the Labor Party has starkly revealed the party itself as a zombie party.
In the end the crisis of the Labor Party is not a personality crisis but a crisis of relevance for the way politics is done by the major parties. In the case of Labor, no matter how many times Gillard repeats her mantras, such as the latest, Albanese inspired ‘Great Labor Values’, she will never be able to transform the party into a progressive force that it may once have been.
Doing the hard work on delivering neoliberal reforms or coded dog whistling to the more racist elements of the country do not reflect progressive values, whether ‘Great Labor Values’ or not. The Malaysia Solution and her inaugural ‘Australia is a sanctuary’ for ‘hard working families’ speech has set the town of her reign.
Whatever the individual faults of former Prime Minister Rudd may be, they are overshadowed by the collective faults of the Labor Party and its continued masquerade as having any relevance as a progressive force in Australian politics. They are overshadowed by the irrelevance of Canberra, its politicians and media to real politics.
It may be true that the party rooms elect the leaders of the respective ‘political’ parties (‘political’ because really they are no more than managerial elites). But no matter how many times Crean lectures us on the reality of the system he will never convince people on the street that the Labor Party is doing a good job. Whether they are or not is irrelevant.
Crean, Gillard and others seem to believe that if they continue to appeal to our rational side and understand that they really do have our best interests at heart we will all come to our senses and see their particular light on the hummock.
Their particular appeals to the reality of the political process are smothered with the rhetoric of democratic centralism and of being good neoliberal mangers. But what they seem incapable of understanding is that the rest of world is no longer the same as the small one which they inhabit. In the world of the global society of the spectacle what passes for politics is exactly celebrity Big Brother. In this world it is events that shape the future and not the rolling out of good policy. Like it or not this is the world we live in.
The appeal of former Prime Minister Rudd may simply be that it consists in the fact that he seems to speak directly to people, that he seems to want to engage them in the process of governance. His appeal may quite simply consists in the fact that he seems to have not been beholden to the elites of the Labor Party and the bureaucracy. Some people seem to actually like the fact that he kept bureaucrats waiting for three hours, that he behaves badly, that he is an ideas man, that he speaks to the people and not the centralism of the Labor caucus.
In the end former Prime Minister Rudd may not be the answer to a new progressive politics, but he may well still continue to serve as a catalyst that will more than likely see the continued transformation of the political system in Australia. In the face of a wave of new progressive democratic movements across the globe, such as the Occupy movements and Real Democracy Now in Spain what we will probably see is the demise of Labor as the pretender of progressive politics in Australia.
The next election could well see more informal voting, the election of more independents and more Greens along with an Abbot PM. But the ensuing crisis will ensure the slow demise of democratic centralism of the collective party rooms as we continue to see people walk away from a form of politics in which the government might reign but it no longer governs.
For a new world we need a new politics.
For bringing this to the attention of many we should be grateful to former PM Rudd.