The opprobrium directed at the new 100m world champion has hardly been a surprise but British fans should be wary of a holier than thou attitudeBefore we begin in semi-earnest, a word on “serving one’s time” in the athletics ban sense of the term. I am all for doing one’s time and that being an end to it, but it does seem worth acknowledging what this means in any other place of work.Say you worked at a building society, and were eventually discovered to have been cheating it out of funds, not to mention stealing from your colleagues’ wallets too. You’re out, you’re disgraced, you “do your time”, whatever form that may take. And at that point, your debt to...
The NFL’s brutality often leaves its players with crippling pain. But many believe the league has fought against a sensible alternative to addictive opioidsThe ethical gymnastics demanded of NFL fans have grown more challenging over the past decade as the scientific evidence linking football with brain injuries mounts. Last week’s study of 111 deceased NFL players’ brains found evidence of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 110 of the subjects, forcing spectators to reconcile their thirst for the bone-crunching hits at the core of the league’s appeal with an inconvenient reality: that many of the players they cheer will one day pay a grim price long after the lights have gone out.Time and again the NFL, which...
Bryan Fogel’s docu-thriller dissects Russia’s drug-driven corruption of Olympics and challenges belief in world athletics that anti-doping drives are winningOf all the remarkable scenes in Icarus, a new docu-thriller that forensically carries out a portmortem on how Russia corrupted the London 2012 Olympics and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi through the eyes of its chief protagonist, one moment lingers longest – the reaction of leading anti-doping figures when the film’s director, Bryan Fogel, hits them with the grand reveal.“This is the spreadsheet of every single Russian athlete on the state‑mandated protocol,” he tells them at a meeting in Los Angeles in May last year. “What every single athlete was taking in London, including their sample numbers and collection.” Related:...
Remembering the British rider who died on the climb 50 years ago would show the Tour can accept both sides of its past without condoningAs one cycles up Mont Ventoux, the 2,110m high “Giant of Provence”, impressions pile on another like the limestone boulders that make up the summit of the “bald mountain”: the heat, the gradient, the views; the lack of hairpins on what is largely a straight road up a mountainside, the moonscape after leaving the treeline; the sweat in one’s face, the ache in legs and feet and backside – and the energy gel wrappers.Looking at the road as one tries to keep turning the pedals, one passes the wrappers one by one – at a rough...
Fifa must deprive Russia from staging next year’s World Cup if possible doping offences by the country’s 2014 World Cup squad are found to be trueOf 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...