Besiktas – Declan Hill – Investigative Journalist & Academic

The High-Risk Week for the UEFA Champions League

This is the week for the Champions League fixes. The two matches to watch carefully (I do not say that they will be fixed, I am simply red-flagging the games) are Turkish champions Besiktas versus perennial no-hopers Dynamo Kiev and Juventus versus Dinamo Zagreb. Yes, the same Dinamo Zagreb of the infamous winking 7-1 loss to Olympique de Lyon in the same round of the Champions League in 2011. The conditions that make me red-flag these games are: 1) Neither of the...

The Wrong People using the Wrong Tools in the Wrong Way

It is a tale of two reports. The first was released last month by the investigators of the Cycling International Report Commission (CIRI). They examined the actions of Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) who govern elite cycling. Their report is a review of the colossal failure of anti-doping efforts in cycling over the last twenty-years. This failure came about despite tens-of-millions of dollars being spent on anti-doping and the deaths of a number of riders. The former cyclist Nicole Cooke brilliantly described...