Lord Moynihan (Con)

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Johnson and all members of the committee on the work that they have done on this important issue. The contributions to this debate have fallen into two broad categories: detailed examination of the convention, mainly from the lawyers; and the vital importance of the convention from the perspective of the world of sport. I will speak today not primarily as a politician but as someone who, for many years, trained and helped to prepare and steer a succession of British rowing eights to the start line, trusting that the crews alongside me were competing on equal terms. That trust is the entire currency of sport. Once spent, it is brutally hard to recover. During my time, performance-enhancing drugs were common behind the Iron Curtain. Later, after reunification, the East German crew who marginally beat us to gold in the Moscow Olympics took legal action against the West German Government for the damage the drugs had caused them. For many years, doping—to knowingly deny clean athletes medals and a livelihood—was the major issue that concerned us in competitive international sport. Today, that currency is under assault from every direction—from the criminal syndicates behind match fixing, from the laboratories quietly exploring what gene doping might do to an athlete’s body and now, from a technology more powerful than either: artificial intelligence and the still distant but not unimaginable prospect of machine superintelligence and corrupted athletic performance. I will take these in turn, because each deserves the Committee’s attention and because, I will argue, they are not separate problems at all but the same problem wearing different kit—a point well made by my noble friend in sport, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington. They both focused on the vital importance of this convention to sport in the wider context of trafficking, prostitution and modern slavery—all critical points that are currently evidenced in the world of international sport. On match fixing and the manipulation of competitions, which we are focusing on today, we have made real progress. The Macolin convention stands as the only binding international instrument the world has produced on this subject, and I welcome that the Government are finally moving toward ratification, some eight years after we signed it. But let us not mistake travelling for arrival. Out of 43 signatories, 17 states have ratified. The private betting operators, who hold more real-time data on suspicious markets than anyone, remain locked out of the convention’s own co-ordinating bodies. An illicit betting market estimated at close to €1 trillion in stakes does not wait patiently for Parliaments to catch up. To its credit, the International Olympic Committee has built real infrastructure; here I declare my interest as a former chairman of the British Olympic Association and a member of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012. That real infrastructure and work—the Integrity Betting Intelligence System, the Joint Integrity Units we saw pioneered at London 2012 and which have been refined ever since, and the athlete ambassadors now walking the corridors of sport, particularly Olympic sport—deserve recognition. Both Thomas Bach, the recently retired president of the International Olympic Committee, and Kirsty Coventry, who has inherited his mantle and done outstanding work in the 15 months since she overwhelmingly won her presidency, deserve our thanks and praise. But—I turn to the important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame—in sport, infrastructure without universal participation is a fortress with open gates. On gene doping, we face a quieter but, in my view, more troubling threat. Here is the uncomfortable truth: we do not yet have a reliable test. A protein produced by an athlete’s own manipulated genome can be chemically identical to one that their body would have made regardless. We are, in effect, asking anti-doping science to prove a negative against an opponent who has not yet been caught, even once. Unlike a banned substance that clears the bloodstream, genetic alteration can be permanent. A decision made once on a young athlete’s body or a baby, genetically modified, cannot be undone. I do not raise this to cause alarm. There is no confirmed case in human sport, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the scientific capability is advancing far faster than our capacity to police it. Now, overshadowing both, comes artificial intelligence. I will be candid with this Committee about what concerns me most. It is not that AI is inherently a threat in this context. Indeed, the same pattern-recognition capability that could help a criminal syndicate disguise a fixed match inside 1,000 innocuous-looking bets is precisely the capability that lets Sportradar and the IOC’s own systems flag that match in seconds. The same computational power that might one day help a rogue laboratory design an undetectable genetic enhancement is the power that could help our scientists build the detection test we currently lack. This is not a battle between good technology and bad technology; it is a race between who deploys a capability first and who deploys it more wisely. Here is my fear: the institutions charged with protecting sport—the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, along with the IOC’s integrity units and the Council of Europe’s follow-up committee—are by their nature slow. They are multilateral and consensus-driven, and many are chronically underfunded relative to the sums at stake. The actors on the other side of this ledger—organised crime, and in time perhaps state or commercially motivated actors seeking genetic advantage—answer to no such constraints. If advanced artificial intelligence reaches those who would corrupt sport before it reaches those who would protect it, we will not be having this debate about incremental threats. We will be having it about whether elite competition, where doping has the marginal effect between winning and losing, retains any meaning at all. What, then, can be done? I turn to my noble friend and say first that universal ratification of instruments such as Macolin cannot remain aspirational, but it is very difficult to see what can be done otherwise. I suggest to the Committee that it should become a condition precedent of hosting any international event, of federation membership—both international and national—and of our own governing bodies. The easiest way to make sure that this is effective is not through the Council of Europe or Governments; it is by getting sport that is still run autonomously. Through federations and via the IOC, any bidding city in the world that wants to host the Olympic Games needs to sign this. They are the ones we should focus on. Secondly, the artificial wall between public and private betting integrity data must come down. Criminals do not respect that distinction and neither should our defences. Thirdly, we must fund anti-doping detection science, including for genetic methods, as though it were a genuine arms race, because it is one. Fourthly, and perhaps most urgently, this House and our international partners must begin now to think seriously about how sport governance engages with frontier AI development before the technology outpaces our institutions rather than serving them. I competed for this country believing that what happened on the water was decided by skill, preparation and courage, not by what was in a syringe, coded into a genome or manipulated from a betting terminal in another jurisdiction. That belief is the entire point of the exercise. We owe it to every footballer, to every sportsman and sportswoman, and to every young athlete preparing for Los Angeles—and every Olympic Games beyond—to ensure that that belief remains true. I commend the convention to the Committee.