Advocacy

As an athlete, I mostly stayed out of politics. I didn’t pay much attention to the institutions that shaped my career or the role that international sport plays in global politics. I didn’t appreciate the ways that my profession was part of a global sport system that is used to further the political agendas of autocratic leaders. I also didn’t consider how organizations such as the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency insulate themselves from accountability.

After I retired, I began to see Olympic sport for what it is—an often abused geopolitical tool—and I was motivated to fight for an international sport system that is accountable to athletes. Along with a team of other athletes and former sport administrators, I helped found the advocacy organization Global Athlete to work toward rebalancing the power between sport administrators and athletes. We believe that when sport administrators are held accountable to athletes, sport will cease to be an instrument of war, abuse, and corruption.

At Global Athlete, I have worked on a broad range of campaigns—some successful, some unsuccessful, and some still in progress. One such campaign was to pressure the World Anti-Doping Agency into holding the Russian government accountable for its 2010-2015 state-sponsored doping program. Another seeks to pressure the International Olympic Committee into liberalizing rules restricting athletes’ political speech at the Olympic Games. A campaign during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing sought to expose the Chinese government’s efforts to distract from and deny the Uyghur genocide and other human rights atrocities.

In addition to my advocacy with Global Athlete, I worked with the U.S. Helsinki Commission from 2018 to 2020 to lobby Congress to pass the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act. The legislation criminalizes the facilitation of international sports-doping conspiracies. During the campaign, I worked with several current and past Olympic athletes and athlete groups to write op-eds and make statements in support of the bill. After the legislation was signed into law in 2020, I testified in Congress about the need for federal law enforcement to strongly enforce it.