The Court of Arbitration for Sport has for decades served as the final arbiter on sports disputes throughout the world, ruling on thousands of cases ranging from trifling to momentous. The court enabled Oscar Pistorius to run against able-bodied athletes, upheld the cyclist Floyd Landis’s doping suspension and prevented Luis Suárez from overturning his suspension from soccer for biting an opponent at the 2014 World Cup.
All Olympic federations and the World-Anti Doping Agency recognize the court’s supremacy, and athletes can compete only if they waive their right to bring sports cases to their national courts by signing arbitration clauses binding them to the sports court, which is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.