Will IOC Have Balls To Bar Football From Olympics If FIFA Cries Foul On WADA Plans?

Global governors of football, a sport long wracked with corruption and not known for its strong anti-doping stance, have become the first to flex their muscles in a bid to keep the World Anti-Doping Agency at bay when to comes to plans for a new approach to tackling drugs and funding anti-doping in sport. FIFA bosses simply do not wish to relinquish control.

The International Olympic Committee may now conclude that football – not a big draw at the Olympic Games, where the sport is restricted to age groups and developing talent – should be placed in the list of “sports to replace at future Games” after a senior FIFA figure said ‘you can’t touch our control of anti-doping’.

That position risks the unedifying sight of international federations from Olympic sports cowering behind the goal post of football, a sport that occupies more time and energy of the Court of Arbitration for Sport than any other sport by a vast margin.

Sports leaders are at loggerheads over how to fight the use of performance-enhancing drugs as WADA goes into a key reform summit this weekend, on the table such questions as:

Who watches the global doping watchdog? What powers go to whom and what form would those take? Who pays?

And all against the backdrop of the Russian doping scandal and the Olympic Games in Rio at which booing and jeering became a part of world-class swimming as athletes, coaches and others called time on tolerance in the face of the inability of IOC/FINA to keep cheats out of the water.

The WADA Foundation must now come up with the first set of answers on future plans after its meeting in Glasgow tomorrow, just weeks shy off a new report on the Russian crisis from Prof. Richard McLaren that is expected to heap further pressure on those who have gone for leniency, tolerance, laissez-faire and backed a system that slaps maximum penalties on the unknown swimmer …

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