#360view: Why can’t FIFA treat Spain’s doping with contempt?

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  • Gianni Infantino

    Spanish sport has, to put it mildly, a colourful past when it comes to doping. It wasn’t until 2006 that the practice was made illegal while it took until 2013 for the Spanish Agency for the Protection of Health in Sport to be established, to help meet World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recommendations.

    Scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs have often fallen within the borders of the country; from Lance Armstrong, to Eufemiano Fuentes and Operation Puerto while in June last year, renowned athletics coach Jama Aden was arrested at a hotel in Catalonia with EPO allegedly found on the scene.

    It’s a problem that seemingly won’t go away, which is why the news that just 57 players have been tested in La Liga this season – none from their European-qualified teams – is particularly galling, for anti-doping, Spain and football.

    Spain is one of the world’s premier sporting nations with elite athletes in football, basketball, tennis, cycling, golf, athletics and motorsport; they set the standards in terms of performance so, by definition, should also lay down an example in combating cheating.

    And yet they continue to ensure alarm bells ring loud and clear. Operation Puerto and the future of the mystery blood bags continues to rumble on. Andy Murray labelling the initial decision to destroy the evidence following Fuentes’ conviction in 2013 as, “a joke… biggest cover up in sports history?”

    Former WADA chief Dick Pound adding: “Everybody knows we will be able to uncover quite a bit more doping if the examples are made available.”

    We’re still waiting to find out the destiny of those 211 blood bags, but this takes on extra degree of significance when Fuentes himself admitted treating footballers.

    Tyler Hamilton, once of the key whistleblowers in the Armstrong case, also claimed in his gamechanging book ‘The Secret Race’ that when taking EPO in his early days of using the drug when based in Girona, he was told not to worry as cyclists’ level of dosing was nothing compared to footballers.

    In 2004, former cyclist Jesus Manzano claimed he personally witnessed two former Brazilian players and an ex-Spanish international visit Fuentes’ Madrid clinic.

    In his autobiography ‘I Think, Therefore I Play’ Andrea Pirlo, then of AC Milan, feared players from Deportivo La Coruna were under the influence of prohibited substances in 2004 when they miraculously came back from a 4-1 deficit in the Champions League to win the second leg 4-0.

    “Their players were crazy buzz bombs flying around all over the place… for the first and only time in my life, I’ve wondered if people I’d shared a pitch with might have been on something,” wrote Pirlo.

    Evidence of varying degrees of credibility but evidence nonetheless. And, as context to Thursday night’s revelations, would surely be enough, you’d think, to capture FIFA’s attention?

    FIFA president Gianni Infantino has claimed to be tough on doping, actively trying (and failing) to force former Russian sports minister and FIFA Council member Vitaly Mutko to step down in the wake of the McLaren Report into Russian state-sponsored doping.

    That said, Russia 2018 continues to go ahead with FIFA’s preliminary investigation into McLaren’s finding not concerning Mutko. FIFA and UEFA had already been contacted by WADA to take over the testing following the Spanish Anti-Doping Agency (AEPSAD) lack of compliance with the international code.

    They responded by citing jurisdiction and red tape as a reason to do nothing, effectively allowing sub-standard anti-doping procedures to continue. Cycling’s credibility as a sport is still to fully recover from Armstrong.

    The American took hundreds of tests yet was never pinged despite undergoing a sustained and organised doping regime throughout the most successful years of his career. AEPSAD aren’t even testing their elite footballers.

    The UCI have pleaded ignorance to Armstrong and the EPO years of the late 1990s and early 2000s when the sport was so dirty, clean riders were effectively forced into retirement.

    The concept of competitiveness completely destroyed. There’s nothing to suggest football has such a problem but processes and safeguards need to be tightened. Ignorance and apathy in the face of such evidence, after all, isn’t that far away from complicity.

    If Spain need to set an example in a wider sense, then FIFA – the organisation which governs the world’s most global and richest sport – must be pioneers in ensuring it remains PED-free.

    Because if any kind of widespread scandal, which looks increasingly likely, was to break out the consequences could well be irreparable, not just for football but sport itself.

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