The World Anti-Doping Agency is set to ignore the clamour from outraged athletes and national doping federations and relax its ban on RussiaHas a performance ever felt less enhanced than that of the World Anti‑Doping Agency? The body notionally responsible for keeping sport clean is on the brink of lifting Russia’s doping ban, about 10 minutes after that country’s state agents were discovered to have spent much of the Sochi Winter Olympics passing clean piss through a hole in a testing lab wall, and swapping it with athlete piss marginally less tainted than the lake inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.But hey. Russia would like you to know that they’re just not those people any more. I imagine the speech requesting...
Worrying evidence was heard last week about medication practices that apparently persisted for years at one stable The extent to which racehorses are medicated is a topic of conversation once more, or should be, following the extraordinary evidence given at a disciplinary hearing on Friday by Robin Bastiman, who trained Borderlescott to win two Nunthorpes a decade ago. Bastiman has since passed on the licence to his daughter, Rebecca, and both are defending themselves against a charge from the British Horseracing Authority that they gave a raceday injection of a substance containing cobalt to one of their runners in 2016. Related: Advertise lives up to the hype with win in Phoenix Stakes for Martyn Meade Related: Advertise lives up to...
While Simon Yates comes out of the Giro d’Italia with credit, there is still uncertainty about Team Sky and their lead rider When Simon Yates cracked so disastrously on the bottom slopes of the Colle delle Finestre while leading the Giro d’Italia last Friday, it looked like the most humiliating of personal catastrophes. Yet it may have been the best thing that has ever happened to the young English rider, at least if he wants to avoid the fate of Chris Froome, the man who caused his downfall. Yates had gone into his 13th day in the leader’s pink jersey holding an advantage of almost half a minute over his nearest pursuer, with the memory of a trio of majestic...
A combination of athletic prowess and personal eccentricity made him a beloved national figure but the latest allegations against him and Team Sky have at the very least tainted that legacyThe golden throne outside Hampton Court Palace. The Sun’s stick-on sideburns. The ringing of a 23-ton bell to open the Olympics. The quirky victory speech on the Champs-Elysées. The crescendo of noise that greeted the smashing of the world hour record in the London velodrome. A kaleidoscope of memories. How far in the past they seem now, and how faded the images, as a beleaguered Bradley Wiggins seeks to preserve his reputation.The incessant attacks, including the particularly massive one provoked by yesterday’s release of the parliamentary report into doping in...
Athletes are becoming more susceptible to being spiked and more prone to outlandish explanations if the recent case of a couple of Japanese kayakers is anything to go byThere are all manner of reasons why an athlete might fail a drug test and it seems the rarest, the most exotic of the lot, may just be they were actually cheating. Because it’s an offence very few athletes ever confess to.There was the cyclist who argued his positive test was down to a vanishing twin he had absorbed in utero. The high jumper who suggested he had been set up by the Cuban-American mafia and the sprinter who explained his testosterone levels were high because he had had a lot of...