Sport must wait, says Gerrard

Leading sports medicine professor David Gerrard says sport and its chance of getting back on to the field need to take a back seat to the country’s health and government guidelines.

Gerrard, who is an emeritus professor at the University of Otago, said he also believed it would be naive to not think unscrupulous athletes and coaches will take advantage of lockdown rules and use performance-enhancing drugs.

With most sport at all levels cancelled for the best part of a month, thoughts have moved to when forms of sport can start back up and at what level it will get back to.

Gerrard said sport will just have to bide its time.

"No sport is greater than the Government and the public health. So they will just have to wait their turn," he said.

"I think the Prime Minister said something like we have had a good first half and we don’t want to squander it. And I do agree with her.

"We don’t want to come out of it and then get out and do all sorts of things and end up going straight back to level four.

"Ultimately we will come out of this — nothing surer. But there will be a lot of heartache and economic hurt along the way."

Gerrard said a vaccine will come about and hard immunity will develop and that will lead to certain activities being possible.

But no-one can say with any certainty when that will happen.

He felt athletes needed to have a decent amount of time to train and prepare for events.

"We have to be fair to everyone. What we are going to see is different regions coming out of this and that means athletes will be training at different times. That is going to make it unfair for those who have not been able to train. Some pools and tracks may not be able to be used by some people while others can."

To be fair to everyone, all athletes should have the same amount of time to train.

Gerrard said he had a little bit of a concern about drug testing going on hold and athletes and countries taking that to their advantage.

"At the moment there is no testing going on. What if a drug tester comes to the door of an athlete ... the athlete is quite within his rights to say ‘no, you can’t come into my bubble.’

"So the athlete could use that to his advantage. Take some sort of anabolic steroid to help them during training now. It would be naive to think this is not going to happen."

Gerrard, a former Commonwealth Games gold medallist swimmer, was on a group for FINA, the federation overseeing international swimming sports, and advising on what the way forward for the sports is.

He said there was no evidence which showed Covid-19 existed in water. But Fina events had been cancelled, as well as some Olympic qualifying events.

Sports may have to look to have domestic-based events to start with as travel is banned from country to country, he said.