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...
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...
Lindsey Vonn’s outburst against Donald Trump means she takes her place in a complex game where politics and sport have once again become deeply entangledOn the face of it, Lindsey Vonn looks like Donald Trump’s type. Tall, blond, blue-eyed and a former star – naked but for a coat of paint – of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the champion skier is the epitome of what would once have been called an all-American girl. And she will be one of the main draws of February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, hoping to repeat her 2010 Olympic downhill win in Vancouver and thus take a measure of solace for her absence through injury in Sochi four years ago.Coming off a 2016-17 season...
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:...