Take World Cup 2018 out of Russia, urges US anti-doping tsar
The head of the US anti- doping federation whose most famous scalp is former seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, was in Dublin yesterday speaking to leaders from 19 National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs) at a special summit, hosted by Sport Ireland.
They discussed the McLaren report that revealed serious breaches in Russia’s anti-doping agency, uncovering not just a failure of their anti-doping controls but an approach to cover up and protect Russian athletes who had failed doping tests.
World Anti-Doping Agency investigator Richard McLaren last month reported an “institutional conspiracy” involving over 1,000 Russian athlete’s across 30 sports including evidence of large scale sample swapping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
“I think until Russia can show they are co-compliant (compliant with the WADA regulations), all competitions and that would include (the World Cup) if they’re not compliant by the time of that event, it should be removed,” explained Tygart.
“It’s for the health and safety and benefit of the athletes competing. You saw athletes in bobsleigh, skeleton, biathlon, and cross country skiing rising up and saying, if their willing to go to that extent to win, what are they willing to do?”
Tygart says the current Russian system simply is not good enough. There is no co-compliant anti-doping going on,” he said.
“There’s no collection, there’s no laboratory, and what are they willing to do from a health and safety stand point when we’re competing? Whether it’s the food we eat and drink or how our samples are collected, so until they get that in order, is that going to take 10 years? I hope not, but it certainly is going to take some time as everyone who’s been over there has agreed to.”
With Martin O’Neill’s team in a strong position to qualify for next summer’s World Cup in Russia, Sport Ireland chief executive John Treacy also supported Tygart’s call on Fifa to move the 2018 World Cup from Russia to another host. Athletics governing body the IAAF were the first sport’s authority to discipline the Russian federation having first suspended Russia from international athletics and then moving two events in 2016 from Russia to other host countries, however Fifa has shown no such intention.
“It’s a classic sport response,” explained Tygart of Fifa’s resistance to move the World Cup from Russia.
“Stick your head in the sand and let’s hope it moves on down the track and the crisis goes away. It highlights the importance of independence and improving.
“It’s just like the IOC report about Rio, you know everyone has moved on. But if you look at that report and I was in front of a group of USA track and field athletes back in December and they were outraged that almost 1,900 athletes in 10 high risk sports weren’t tested at all, going into the Rio Olympic Games. Yet the IOC says testing was a success and didn’t compromise the integrity of the games? It’s inconsistent. We have to continue to highlight these issues to kind of ensure the kind of change that clean athlete’s demand is met.”
While pressurising Fifa to move the 2018 World Cup, Tygart, Treacy, and representatives of other national agencies number one objective from the forum was to develop a fully independent WADA which has no representation on its board from the likes of Fifa or the IOC.
Tygart says “making WADA the global regulator and truly independent” is his number one priority, thereby “removing sport from the executive functions of the global regulation”.
“You know they could make that decision today. They could say, sport has 50% of the WADA board we’re going to remove that 50%” explained Tygart, insisting the likes of the IOC could step down immediately. “So remove the fox from guarding the hen house, right now sport is the fox. They have an interest getting into the hen house and their the one’s guarding the hen house and it just simply can’t be done. You can’t promote and police yourself.”
The USADA chief described the situation as laughable, when associations like the IAAF attack WADA, as they did in 2015 when the early revelations of anti-doping corruption in Russia began.
“Listen what’s laughable to me” smiles Tygart, “and you saw the IOC in Rio and certain organisations attack WADA, it’s really laughable to those who know the real situation is the IOC is WADA. It’s an executive board member of the IOC that is the president of WADA so when their attacking WADA, they are attacking themselves. It’s just an easy convenient excuse used to try to pass the buck on what was a poor decision by the IOC not to ban the Russian’s on going into Rio.”
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