The Purpose Behind the Rulebook

Every governing body begins with a noble purpose: to protect the integrity of its sport and the welfare of its people. Rules are the instruments of that purpose. But instruments can drift from their intent, and when they do, governance stops being a framework for opportunity and becomes a barrier to it.

I saw this drift at close range. For nearly ninety years, British professional boxing operated a rule that barred athletes with Type 1 diabetes from holding a professional licence. It took a five-year campaign — one I was privileged to lead — to overturn it, culminating in the first professional boxing licence ever granted to a boxer with Type 1 diabetes in the UK. The rule had been written to protect athletes. By the end, its only measurable effect was to exclude them.

When Protection Becomes Exclusion

The distinction matters because it is subtle. Nobody involved in maintaining the old rule believed they were doing harm. They believed they were being careful. But caution that never updates itself is not care — it is neglect wearing the language of responsibility.

Medical science had transformed the management of Type 1 diabetes over those nine decades. Continuous glucose monitoring, modern insulin therapies and structured clinical supervision had changed what was possible. The athletes had changed too: disciplined, informed, and often more attentive to their physical condition than their peers, because their lives depended on it. The only thing that had not changed was the rule.

The Test Every Rule Should Pass

Out of that campaign I developed a simple test that I now put to every board and governing body I work with. For any rule that restricts participation, ask three questions. First, what risk does this rule actually manage, in today's terms? Second, is exclusion the only way to manage that risk, or merely the easiest? Third, who bears the cost of our caution — and have we ever asked them?

A rule that survives those questions deserves its place. A rule that cannot answer them is not governance; it is habit. The boxing licence decision proved that risk can be managed through rigorous, individualised medical frameworks rather than blanket bans — and that the resulting system is both safer and fairer than what it replaced.

Opportunity Is a Governance Outcome

We tend to measure governance by what it prevents: scandals avoided, injuries averted, disputes resolved. We measure it far less often by what it enables. Yet the most important output of a well-governed sport is opportunity — the number of people who can participate, compete and build lives within it.

This conviction runs through everything I do, from advisory work with organisations to my philanthropic initiative Insaaf 4U, which focuses on access to justice. The pattern is the same in sport, in law, and in business: systems designed to protect people drift toward protecting themselves, and it takes deliberate leadership to pull them back to their purpose. Even in my commercial life — building Furniture in Fashion into one of the UK's largest online furniture retailers — the lesson held: structures should serve people, never the reverse.

What Changed for the Athletes Who Came After

The first licence was historic, but the real measure of the campaign is what it made ordinary. There is now a pathway — medically supervised, properly governed, openly documented — for athletes with Type 1 diabetes to pursue professional boxing in the UK. What was once impossible is now simply a process.

That is what good governance looks like: not the absence of rules, but rules that convert risk into process and process into opportunity. Every athlete who walks through that door in the decades ahead will do so without ever needing to know how long it stayed shut. And crucially, the sport itself is better protected than before, because a supervised pathway generates knowledge, data and accountability that a blanket ban never could.

A Question for Every Board

If you sit on a board — in sport or anywhere else — I would leave you with this: somewhere in your rulebook is a provision that made sense when it was written and no longer does. You will not find it by accident. You will find it by looking, by asking the people it affects, and by having the humility to change it when the evidence demands.

Good governance should be the reason opportunity exists, never the reason it doesn't. More on my work and the causes I champion can be found on the homepage and in my latest news and updates.