Organised crime controls ‘at least a quarter’ of world sport
Organised crime controls at least a quarter of all sport globally, according to the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
David Howman made the extraordinary claim after calling for WADA to form part of a new organisation to guard against threats to the integrity of world sport.
“I think, now, organised crime controls at least 25% of world sport in one way or another,” Howman said at the Securing Sport conference in London on Monday.
“Those guys who are distributing drugs, steroids, HGH [human growth hormone] and EPO and so on, are the same guys who are corrupting people, the same guys who are paying money to people to fix games. They’re the same bad guys.
“Now, the good guys have to prevail. Who are the good guys? Let’s get them together and make sure they can work out a plan. Because, otherwise, the bad guys are going to win.”
Howman admitted that the majority of corruption in sport comes below the elite level, but warned that failure to tackle the problem now would be to allow it to worsen in years to come.
“The information we get comes from Interpol, it comes from the sport people who are out there now investigating things,” he said. “You don’t want to believe it but if you don’t want to confront it then you’re going to find a growth.”
Howman has previously called for a world body to fight match-fixing in the same mould of Wada and its mission to eradicate doping. He went further on Monday, suggesting that Wada could join a larger umbrella body aimed at wiping out all forms of corruption from sport.
He said: “Maybe have Wada as one arm of an organisation that is a transparency body for sport integrity, which has an arm for bribery, an arm for corruption, an arm for match-fixing.”
Speaking on the same panel as Howman, chairman of World Snooker and the Professional Darts Corporation corporation Barry Hearn warned that match-fixing could “eventually destroy sport”.
“This is a war and it’s the equivalent to the drug barons around the world,” Hearn said. “It’s a monetary war where violence and corruption go hand in hand.”
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