Melbourne crowds are likely to offer warm support to her this week and research suggests fans continue to back stars and sports laid low by doping scandalsHere is a prediction. Every time Maria Sharapova steps on to court at the Australian Open this year she will be greeted with shrieks of: “Come on Maria!” and elongated waves of goodwill. There will be smiles. And, before even the Russian’s first practice stroke, the unease generated when she received the honour of parading the women’s trophy at the draw last week will be ancient history – much like her positive test for meldonium at Melbourne Park two years ago, and her 15-month suspension.The thing is, we – the public – talk a...
The Winter Olympics, World Cup and Commonwealth Games will all have an unavoidable backdrop that reminds us that all international sport is politicalIn the winter of 1945, Dynamo Moscow came to Britain on a goodwill football tour that turned out to be anything but. They played Chelsea, Cardiff City, Arsenal and Rangers, the last two matches so rancorous they inspired George Orwell to write his famous essay The Sporting Spirit. The tour, Orwell wrote, had only created fresh animosity on both sides. “And how could it be otherwise?” he asked. “I’m always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between nations.” Sport, Orwell thought, had become “bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with...
The advent of T20 and increased demands on cricketers’ bodies and power mean that where the notion of performance enhancing drugs was once far-fetched, it is naive to imagine that is still the caseFor all its long, rich history for indulging boozers and gamblers and rakes, one vice cricketers never really seem to have acquired is doping. So far as the sport has ever had a problem, it’s been with the drugs that impair performance, rather the ones that enhance it. Plenty of cricketers have been caught, and occasionally even confessed to using, cannabis, cocaine, even, in one especially recherché recent case, opium. So far as PEDs go though, there have been a handful of players banned because they’d taken...
Despite calls from UK and US anti-doping bodies for shamed nation to be banned from February’s games, IOC and Wada inaction could let them off the hook‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the fix is already in,” warned Travis Tygart, the venerable head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, when I asked him on Thursday whether Russia will compete at the 2018 Winter Olympics. It was not so much pessimism as prophecy. Twenty-four hours later Alexander Zhukov, the head of the Russian Olympic Committee, confidently predicted at the 131st IOC summit in Lima: “It will be a Russian team with the Russian anthem and Russian flag” in Pyeongchang.Of course it will be. No one who follows the arcane politics of the International...
Maria Sharapova is back and her drug ban is receding into memory in a sport where the anti-doping procedure barely scratches the surface of a problem that is unlikely to be non-existentIn tennis, cleanliness is next to wealthiness. Announcing record levels of sponsorship deals back in 2015, the ATP chairman Chris Kermode explained: “People see [tennis] as a clean sport, it’s a great product with great athletes and I think tennis is in the best place it’s ever been.”Why do people see tennis as a clean sport? The simple answer is that very few players ever test positive for banned substances. Except in faintly glamorous ways, like when Richard Gasquet ingested cocaine from kissing a lady all night in a...