Dick Pound’s defence of his latest successor as Wada president, Craig Reedie, just doesn’t stand upEncouraging news for the embattled Wada president, Sir Craig Reedie, as the founder Wada president, Dick Pound, rides eye-catchingly to his defence. By way of recap, Russia last week missed the deadline to allow the World Anti‑Doping Agency access to the Moscow laboratory that was at the heart of its massive state-sponsored doping programme. This deadline was itself a bizarre act of faith on Wada’s part, given that Russia has failed to comply with two crucial recommendations of the McLaren report which uncovered the vast scale of their cheating.Anyway, the predictably missed deadline has gone down like the proverbial sandwich with many national anti-doping authorities,...
In response to the impact of transgender athletes some advocate the sexes competing together, a move others argue would banish women from top-level sportCan you imagine sport without separate men’s and women’s categories? A world where Serena Williams never got a sniff of 23 majors – not with Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic in her path – and the golden British women’s hockey team of Rio 2016 never even took to the field. It sounds like a dystopian nightmare. In fact it was an idea mooted on Radio 4 last week in a Woman’s Hour discussion about whether transgender women should play women’s sports.When it was put to the psychologist Dr Beth Jones that it could lead to...
Reaction to the 250 or so Commonwealth Games athletes and officials seeking to stay underlines a basic rule of thumb: never believe what a country says about itself during a mega-eventAfter the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne 61 athletes and officials defected. Heroes, every one of them, in an era when switching from east to west – or vice versa – made the humans themselves prized trophies, coveted propaganda wins in the endless Cold War dick-measuring contest. Following last month’s Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast it has been revealed that around 200 athletes and officials have outstayed their visas and are now seeking asylum. (Another 50 remain in the country illegally.) It is not called defecting today, you’ll note,...
The ECB chairman seems determined to push on with his plans for The Hundred despite the outcry the prospect of the new format has caused across the gameThere is no fiercer battle than the one to be the least appealing individual in British sporting governance. It is a field in which we are absolutely world class. From the FA to the RFU to the ECB to the Jockey Club and far beyond, we really bring home the bacon. All the cured pork, in fact. Of all the games we invented, this is the last one we can always be sure of winning.And yet, even by the high standards of his peers, the England and Wales Cricket Board chairman, Colin Graves, is...
The idea Kim Jong-un’s heart has been melted because North Korea has been permitted to send a figure skating pair across the DMZ to compete at the Winter Olympics feels a bit of a stretchFor an event that claims to exist in the rarefied air far above politics, it’s remarkable how often the Olympics is used as a political pawn. In recent years Beijing used the 2008 Games as a curtain raiser for their new era of global domination, while Vladimir Putin used the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi as the curtain-raiser for his invasion of the Crimea, among various other Corinthian enchantments.Every Games is a hotbed of political activity of varying sorts, with the VIP seats filled by power players...