Gary should have said no to the dopers
EVEN if Gary Lineker has somehow managed to convince himself that it’s OK to hang with his new friends at FIFA, the decision to endorse Russia’s World Cup with his presence in Moscow must have felt like a spectacular error of judgement yesterday.
Only a few hours before our Gary hosted the draw with the same silky smoothness he has long displayed in the BBC studio, the man running next summer’s tournament reminded us why Lineker, one of FIFA’s mostost high- profile critics,s, should have declinedd the request to be here by laughing down the phone. Earlier this week the
New York Times published extracts from the diaries of Grigory Rodchenkov, dusrned the former Russian doping chief-turned whistleblower. Containedid on those hand- written pages was detail of a meeting he had with Vitaly Mutko four days before the 2014 winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
In that meeting, the diaries claim, Dr Rodchenkov handed Mutko — then Russian sports minister — a list of Russian athletes who were being given a cocktail of anabolic steroids called ‘The Duchess’ but would avoid detection thanks to a stock of clean urine.
The IOC, who will decide next Tuesday whether the Russians are to be banned from the Olympic, consider Rodchenkov a credible witness. But here yesterday Mutko occupied a stage with Gianni Infantino and hijacked the pre- draw press conference to get his retaliation in first.
‘There has never been and will never be any state-sponsored doping in this country,’ claimed Mutko, before brazenly declaring that they are ‘playing by the rules’.
Russia’s deputy prime minister then accused the New York Times of essentially acting as the mouthpiece of the IOC. He suggested the media should devote as much attentiattention to, among others, ‘dopdoping in football or other spsports in the UK’. ‘No one is looking into tthat,’ he added, having aalso mentioned a doping scandal in Norway and one in America.
Infantino suggested MMutko will still have his susupport whatever the outoutcome of events at the IOCI headquarters in LausanneL on Tuesday. ‘We are very relaxed,’ he said. Yet he shouldn’t be. Not when he is endorsing a man dismissing compelling evidence as ‘allegations made by individual statements’.
‘People are checking for scratches on the test tubes? Well, do that in the rest of the world and there’ll be scratches all over the place,’ Mutko continued.
And he has a point. Doping is not exclusive to Russia. But Mutko is a central figure in one of the biggest scandals in sporting history. And here last night Lineker was sharing a stage with him.