LONDON, May 30: Britain’s 9,000 athletics coaches have been asked if they would be willing to undergo checks to see if they have criminal records, British athletics’ governing body said on Thursday.

A spokeswoman for UK athletics said Wednesday’s announcement was an advance warning of the introduction of the checks, which would become mandatory from 2003, with all coaches needing to renew their licences by 2005.

“We don’t anticipate there’s going to be an across-the-board refusal (to submit to the check),” she said.

UK Athletics had not yet decided how to decide which offences would debar someone from coaching.

“That’s still something that’s under development,” the spokeswoman said. “If someone has been convicted of child molesting, it’s obvious that that person is not fit to be a coach.”

But Britain’s Amateur Swimming Association said it planned to cast the net much more widely than UK Athletics, targeting up to 50,000 people who had individual contact with young swimmers, including teachers, chaperones, administrators and the drivers who took children to the pool.

“To just do coaches is just not good enough,” said ASA chief executive David Sparkes.

A leading British swimming coach was jailed for eight years in 2001 for sexually abusing boys. Michael Drew was president of the British Swimming Coaches Association, but between the late 1960s and 1991 he abused at least five boys in his care at schools and swimming clubs in London.

The sentencing judge described his crimes as “utterly depraved”. —Reuters