Of course there were denials. There are always denials. It is part of the dance, the fast-paced barynya, when it comes to Russia and doping allegations. No sooner had the Mail on Sunday revealed that the country’s entire 23-man squad for the 2014 World Cup was under investigation by Fifa for possible doping offences, than its deputy prime minister, and chairman of 2018 World Cup Russia, Vatily Mutko, put up the shutters. “There have never been and will never be any problems with doping in our football,” he said. “They have written some sort of nonsense.” He was similarly dismissive about allegations about doping in Russian athletics in 2013. So it goes.
This, of course, is the same Mutko that a World Anti-Doping Agency investigation found might have personally intervened to cover up a failed drug test by a banned foreign footballer, which meant the sample was never declared positive and he was free to keep playing. And the same Mutko who was Russia’s sports minister during the period when the Canadian law professor Richard McLaren found that more than 1,000 elite Russian athletes across 30 sports had benefited from a state-sponsored doping programme. Strangely it did not harm his political career. In fact he was promoted.
These latest revelations were a bombshell with a particularly long fuse. Last December McLaren told us that “the Russian team corrupted the London 2012 Olympic Games on an unprecedented scale”, and that the 2013 World Athletics Championships in Moscow and 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were also perverted. He also revealed that over 30 Russian footballers were implicated but at the time appeared to be unclear who was involved. Now we see the picture in high definition. Yet it always felt strange to believe that football would be any less tainted than rowing, say, or athletics. Or that Russia would attempt to influence the Olympics but not the World Cup. The task, as always, has been proving it.
Yet while Mutko and co are again in the dock, there is only a slim chance of conviction. As the Mail on Sunday notes, the key difficulty for Fifa is that the widespread cover-up means not all the sportspeople implicated in McLaren’s report can be shown to have taken performance-enhancing drugs. Some may be innocent. Their clean urine might have been swapped by the authorities, say, for another clean sample without their knowledge.
That is why Fifa needs to throw everything at this. Of course it will be difficult to prove and prosecute. But one could say the same about previous investigations into Russian sports. Yet investigators such as Dick Pound and McLaren were able to find a way.
Given what McLaren unearthed about the behaviour of the Russian government, which has been accused of having cheated, lied and obfuscated when it comes to doping its sports stars from 2011-2015, there is surely enough evidence to take the World Cup away from Russia. One look at Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, laughing away with Vladimir Putin at the Confederations Cup, suggests the chance of it happening are between slim and none.
Still, these latest revelations leave Fifa with uncomfortable questions. And it is surely about time it started telling us what would it take to withdraw a World Cup from a host country. After all both Russia and Qatar remain under investigation by the Swiss attorney general, Michael Lauber, who is looking into 172 suspicious transactions which passed through Swiss banks in bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. What if he found that both bids were spectacularly corrupt? Common sense tells you it should change something. Fifa-sense tells you it wouldn’t.
Qatar has also been the subject of a damning report by Amnesty International into how it has treated migrant workers building World Cup stadiums. After noting that many of them were forced to live in squalid accommodation, had their wages withheld and passports confiscated, it called the abuse of migrant workers “a stain on the conscience of world football”. Few would question that – except perhaps the bit about football having a conscience.
Maybe it is also time that we are more sceptical about football’s lack of positive doping tests too. True, in the past prominent players have been found to have taken nandrolone, while the 211 blood bags of 36 former clients of Dr Fuentes are also said to include footballers. Yet the stink has been infrequent and never lingered. But would anyone be surprised if some of today’s top players were getting illegal pharmaceutical assistance? Especially as the game is so fast and unrelentingly furious?
This year a study by the University of Gothenburg noted that in the Premier League high-intensity running has increased 50 per cent in 10 years, “presenting new challenges in terms of fatigue resistance and ability to recover quickly”. Of course much of that is because players have to press harder than ever before. But even so the question remains: if athletes and cyclists are resorting to performance-enhancing drugs to thrive or survive, why wouldn’t footballers?
The Mail on Sunday has a sobering analysis about the state of Russian sport after McLaren’s report. It claims hundreds of elite sportsmen and women suspected of benefiting from state-sponsored cheating continue to compete at world level, with “some not even being scrutinised by their sporting authorities, let alone prosecuted”. Perhaps Mutko is not the only one in denial.
(Guardian service)
