Tuesday cover: Athletics world rocked as Russia face Olympics ban

The National’s Sport cover for the Tuesday, November 10 issue, featuring the fallout from the World Anti-Doping Agency’s report on endemic cheating in Russia.

The charges – that Russian athletics orchestrated a widespread doping scheme with assistance from the country's government – could lead to their track-and-field athletes' ban from the 2016 Olympics.

“The commission chaired by Dick Pound recommended that Wada immediately declare the Russian athletics federation “non-compliant” with the global anti-doping code, and that the IAAF suspend the federation from competition.”

“It’s worse than we thought,” Pound said. “It may be a residue of the old Soviet Union system.”

Osman Samiuddin writes, though, that the only surprising thing would be that there is anyone left unjaded enough to be surprised:

“Are we at that stage yet where the instinctive reaction to the latest unwrapping of the shrouds of virtue with which professional sport covers itself is to just shrug our shoulders? That this is all a little meh? Or that of course it is because how can it not be given what is at stake?

“We really might be.

“Who really is surprised by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (Wada) investigation that has found what appears to be systemic and widespread doping in Russian athletics? Or the conclusion that the problem is unlikely to be limited to athletics or Russia, that this is just the tip of the iceberg?

“Come on. Look around you. Given Armstrong, given Fifa, given N Srinivasan (bye, by the way) and the International Cricket Council, given cricket match-fixing, given the el clasico referee who alleges he was approached to fix the game, given almost the entire boxing oeuvre, given, well, years and years of this (hello East Germany and the White Sox); can anyone who follows sport to any degree claim to be surprised a sports federation, probably working in cahoots with the state, is crooked? That we are talking not only of doping, but corruption, even extortion?

“This is what professional sport tends to.”

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