Legal Updates
British Association for Sport & Law
21/10/2011
19th Annual Sports Law Conference
Lords Cricket Ground
22nd September 2011
The event was hosted by Michael Beloff QC who is the Ethics Commissioner for the London 2012 Olympics and also BASL’s President.
The key note speaker was Sir Matthew Pinsent who gave an important insight on not only how to motivate each other as individuals but also as a team. Sir Matthew also emphasized the importance of goal setting particularly in the four year period between Olympic Games. He made the interesting observation that working as a team it was important to get out in the open any problems that existed within that team because of the importance of not even wasting one day’s training even over a four year period. He indicated that between the first gold medal he achieved and his last gold medal the coaches had said that the race should be won in a margin which was 10 seconds quicker than 12 years before. This is an immense improvement in time bearing in mind that when he won the gold medal in Athens in 2004 the race was won by the length of a small glass tumbler over a six minute race!
The conference also discussed the legal challenges and opportunities of the London 2012 Olympics. The most important element was to provide a legal structure and governance for not only the construction projects but all of the roles and responsibilities of those who were going to be involved in the Olympics. The success or otherwise of the Olympics will come under the scrutiny of 21,000 accredited journalists. For the main events such as the Olympic Games, there are stringent guidelines put in place to protect intellectual property rights and to combat what is known as ambush marketing. Alistair Ruxton who was the Head of Legal Services for Sport, London 2012 said that the total number of tickets on sale for the Olympics and Para Olympics was 9 Million.
In one of the discussion sessions there was a debate about corruption in sport and a presentation was given by Andrew Jennings who was a freelance reporter, author and film maker who was involved in the Panorama programme which focused on the allegations against FIFA and in particular, Sepp Blatter. There were further contributions from Graeme McPherson QC who advises in relation to horse racing which has a particularly vigorous licensing and monitoring regime to try and stamp out corruption in racing. He stated that there is in the region of £6 Billion worth of betting in horse racing per year. Horse racing has what is known as a “fit and proper person” test at all levels e.g. whether as a jockey or trainer or anyone else involved in the administration of the sport of horse racing.
There was an extremely interesting and entertaining presentation by Barry Hearn who passed on his top 10 tips for succeeding in business, one of which rather reassuringly was, from the point of view of lawyers, to “listen to good advice”. He also emphasized the importance of not only innovation but giving value for money and targeting your market place.
The final session dealt with how “rights holders” maximise the rights that they own on behalf of their sports. It was also felt that minority sports have a tremendous opportunity to benefit from the Olympic Games with a view to potentially maximising revenue via TV and Media to enable their governing bodies’ to enhance their income.
Richard Moon
