First-time drug cheats "face being banned for life from representing Great Britain under new plans being drawn up by UK Athletics," according to Ben Rumsby of the London TELEGRAPH. UKA Chair Ed Warner revealed British track-and-field athletes would be "forced to sign away their right to compete at the Olympics and other major events if they are found guilty of a serious doping offence." He announced a new athletes’ contract was being drawn up in time for March’s World Indoor Championship, which would include an agreement by competitors that they would forfeit "the right ever to be picked for Britain again" if caught taking performance-enhancing drugs. Lifetime bans for first-time offenders have "failed to stand up to legal challenge in the past but Warner was confident he had found a way to make them stick by getting athletes to contractually agree to such a sanction in advance." Warner also called for Russia's track-and-field team to be banned from this summer's Olympics in Rio after it was found guilty of "state-sponsored" doping. He said, "Do I think that Russia should be back in their team for Rio? No I don't, not at all" (TELEGRAPH, 1/26).
QATAR ATHLETICS: SKY NEWS' Paul Kelso reported two bids for the athletics world championships by Qatar's capital Doha "are being investigated over allegations of bribery by the ethics commissions of athletics' world governing body." Warner told the Parliamentary select committee that Qatar's bids for the '17 and '19 championships "had been referred to the IAAF ethics commission." London beat Doha to win the right to host the '17 championships in a vote in Dec. '11, "but the Qatari city was successful" in its bid for the '19 edition. Earlier this month Warner alleged that, on the night before the '17 vote, he had been told by a senior IAAF official that some officials were being called to a hotel room "to be given a brown envelope." Warner declined to say which senior IAAF official had alerted him to the bribery claims, but said he would be "disappointed" if they had not referred their concerns at the time (SKY NEWS, 1/26). In London, Owen Gibson reported in a "testy exchange" with U.K. MP Damian Collins, Warner "refused to say which senior IAAF figure had told him the brown envelope rumour but would lay everything he knew before the ethics committee." He was asked whether Sebastian Coe, then an IAAF VP and part of the London 2017 bid team, "was the one who had told him but he refused to answer." Coe "told the BBC he had not heard the claims before." Collins said that Warner could be accused of being part of a "conspiracy of silence" because he waited four years before mentioning the rumors. The UKA chair said that it was not until recently "that he had reconsidered the claims in the light of new allegations about Doha's bid and corruption at the IAAF" (GUARDIAN, 1/26).
SPONSORSHIP CASH: ITV reported Warner said that the fight against doping is "under resourced" and suggested that more sponsorship cash "should be used to ensure better tests and transparency." He implied that sponsors could be doing more to help by "staying rather than pulling out" -- and also suggested that football TV sponsorship money "should be siphoned off for the fight against cheats." Warner: "One of the things that sport has to do across all sport is find a way to secure more of its revenues for the fight against doping." He added that it would "make a lot of sense" if football also handed over a "very small portion" of its global TV income to the World Anti-Doping Agency (ITV, 1/26).
