COACHES OF athletes who are found guilty of anti-doping offences should also be banned, says director general of the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) David Howman.

“Yes! And that’s a subject that we feel has to be accentuated to by government,” Howman told the Observer in an exclusive interview yesterday.

“You can deal with lawyers who misbehave; you can deal with journalists who misbehave; you can deal with doctors who misbehave (but), how can we deal with coaches?

“You can strip them from representing the country; you can stop them from going to (an) event, but you can’t stop them from coaching unless there is a law, so we’re looking at ways and means of where that can be encountered,” the WADA boss declared.

“The reason for it is that very often the athlete is, I can’t say innocent, but is the receptacle of information given of persuasion by people who should know better; older people who they take guidance from who tell them to go and do something which is wrong,” Howman added.

“There should be a degree of responsibility… laid at the feet of those people (including) coaches… trainers, agents, doctors, pharmacists, and we think very strongly they’ve got to be dealt with.”

According to the current WADA rules as shown on its web site, www.wada-ama.org, the principle of strict liability only applies to athletes.

“The principle of strict liability is applied in situations where urine/blood samples collected from an athlete have produced adverse analytical results.

“It means that each athlete is strictly liable for the substances found in his or her bodily specimen, and that an anti-doping rule violation occurs whenever a prohibited substance (or its metabolites or markers) is found in bodily specimen, whether or not the athlete intentionally or unintentionally used a prohibited substance or was negligent or otherwise at fault.”

Conversely, there are few documented cases where coaches of sanction athletes have been handed coaching bans.

In July 2008, the United States Anti-doping Agency (USADA) slapped Trevor Graham with a lifetime coaching ban for reportedly helping his athletes, which included Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery, to obtain performance-enhancing drugs. Graham has always denied providing performance-enhancers to his athletes.

Athletics Canada also handed Ben Johnson’s former coach, the late Charlie Francis, a life-time ban after he told a 1989 inquiry that he had introduced Johnson to steroids.

Johnson tested positive for the steroid stanozolol after winning the 100 metres at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and was stripped of his gold medal.

The WADA boss hinted that until countries put legislation in place to sanction coaches and other athlete representatives, the anti-doping fight will not end.

“They should be subject to at least the same sort of sanctions as the athletes. They should be out of sport for two years or out of sport for four years. There’s no reason why not, so I look at it from the angle of being fair to all that might be part of something,” he said.

“If you look in society and you say they are five people are involved in a crime, you don’t just prosecute one, you get the whole five who are involved in the conspiracy. We should be doing the same in sport,” added Howman, who is a lawyer by profession.

WADA, which is headquartered in Montreal, Canada, was established in 1999 to act as an independent international agency to co-ordinate efforts to rid sports of doping. The agency involves government representatives, certain inter-governmental organisations, alongside sporting bodies.