Day 11!

Friday in Switzerland started with a subway ride to CAS, or the Court of Arbitration for Sport. This court decides international sports disputes, which can include instances of doping, match fixing, eligibility issues, etc. There we met one of the lawyers, who was actually from Buffalo, New York. He talked to us about how sports law internationally is different than in the US, as it deals with issues directly about sports themselves, not just between two parties involved in sports.

CAS has been around for nearly 30 years, and has developed into what he called “the Supreme Court for all Olympic disputes.” To ensure equality and fairness across the board, CAS bases their rulings on the legislative codes in place by the organization overseeing each case. For example, rulings for doping are based on the World Anti-Doping Code. Each sport has their own international bodies/codes as well, such as FIFA regulations overseeing soccer rulings. We also talked about a few specific cases, including Oscar Pistorius and the controversial Caster Semenya case. Semenya is a female runner from South Africa. She naturally produces higher testosterone levels than other females, which in turn makes her look a bit like a man, and arguably helps her win female races by wide margins. The CAS just ruled that she has to take drugs to suppress her testosterone levels in order to make it a level playing field for all females racing. He explained how CAS came to this ruling and acknowledged that while controversial, it is an important precedent for them to set.

After this thought provoking-discussion/meeting, we walked around downtown Lausanne for a bit and headed to a pizza place for lunch. After lunch, we travelled just outside of Lausanne to the World Archery Excellence Center. There we got a tour of the center before getting to try out our skills at archery ourselves. After a short teaching period from the instructors, we started firing at targets from a pretty short distance. As we got more comfortable, we began to move further away and shoot at balloons placed in the middle of the targets. We also had some friendly individual and team competitions where we kept score to see who was the most accurate archer. Shoutout to Matt and Christian for catching the team W.

After we finished, we got to see an Olympic archer shoot at a target from the baffling official distance of 70m. We could barely even see the target ourselves, let alone be able to shoot at it, which made it so impressive to watch. We then headed back to our hotel in Lausanne. Many of us grabbed dinner by the Lake and enjoyed the live music going on, and then walked over to the carnival that was set up in time. Overall, another great day on the trip in beautiful Switzerland.