With the publication of the second. Richard Maclaren report into what appears to be state sponsored doping in Russia across many sports there is an obvious call, again, for Russia to be stripped of the World Cup in 2018.
How can a country that supported and encouraged drug taking by its own athletes be trusted to run any major international event? The chairman of the Russia 2018 organising committee, Vitaly Mutko, also a Fifa Council member, is widely understood to have used his position of Minister for Sport to facilitate the cover up of the athlete doping. So how can Fifa entrust their showpiece event to a country that allows their cheats (and politicians) to support cheats?
Will Russia lose the World Cup? My thoughts on what will happen were best summed up by Sean Ingle in The Guardian last Saturday, in number one of his "five questions on the Russian doping scandal." The short, and only answer, is nothing.
"What do Richard McLaren’s devastating reports mean for Russia’s chances of being stripped of football’s 2018 World Cup?
Very little. Barring an unforeseen act of God, the 2018 World Cup is staying put. True, there are growing calls for Russia to be excluded from international competitions – with Richard Ask, the head of Denmark’s anti-doping agency, specifically referencing taking it away. Yet within football’s corridors of power nothing has changed: Fifa simply has no appetite to move the competition from Russia.
It is worth remembering that even after the first McLaren report in July – just when cries for all Russian athletes to miss the Olympics in Rio were at their loudest – football’s world governing body issued a statement that could have been dictated by a senior politburo member during the grimmest days of communism. “Fifa,” it said, “is confident that the local organising committee and the Russian government are going to deliver an outstanding event for football fans two years from now.”
The second part of McLaren’s report added greater texture and depth, but, fundamentally, its overriding theme – that the Russian state deliberately doped its athletes and corrupted international sport – was unchanged. Why would Fifa change tack now?"
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