FIFA feels the heat in search for implicated football
FIFA are under fresh pressure to investigate which Russian international footballers were implicated in the national doping scandal.
It comes after the World Anti-Doping Agency wrote to football’s global governing body offering to act as a go-between so that a key witness can provide evidence. WADA have written to FIFA and other affected international federations reminding them of their responsibility to pursue doping cases against implicated Russian athletes. They also offered to put them in contact with Russian whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory — in reality, the hub of Russia’s doping network.
Rodchenkov, who is in witness protection in the US having fled Russia in fear of his life, has offered to help federations build cases against athletes.
WADA will provide the means for FIFA and other federations to contact Rodchenkov and use his testimony as evidence in anti-doping cases.
More evidence will be provided from databases which WADA extracted from the Moscow lab this month. That is expected to further corroborate that hundreds of Russian
athletes were doping. The problem for FIFA is that Russia is hosting the 2018 World Cup, which starts in June. The IOC will meet on December 5 to discuss the evidence gathered by two commissions looking into Russian doping and look likely to ban Russia from February’s Winter Olympics in South Korea.