Sport and Arbitration

As anyone who has followed this blog would know, I am quite keen about sports and always intrigued by the interaction of sports and dispute resolution systems. Today we have the story on the front page of the Globe and Mail (okay I am talking about the sports section here) about a Danish basketball player's eligibility to play university sports in Canada. The dispute was determined quickly by an arbitrator from the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada. What struck me as most interesting about this article was the discussion about the need to move more quickly to outside arbitration and how that is what happened in this situation as what was supposed to be the front line of decision-making was too closely involved in the case to hear it. Because of that problem, it appears (from what I can gather from the article) that the parties skipped over the first stage of the dispute resolution mechanism and went quickly to outside arbitration. Nice to see arbitration work as a quick and effective means of resolution!