29Sep

It was the best of trials. It was the worst of conferences.

It was the best of trials. It was the worst of conferences. Lets start with the best. In Paris, last week, a proverbial rocket hit the world of sport. The former head of the International Athletic Association Federations (IAAF) - Lamine Diack - was convicted of collecting millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks.The actual scheme was shocking. Diack, along with many of his top aides - including his ‘thug’ son (his words) - was running a racket where athletes,...

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05Dec

Suspicious Games in the Champions League & the Great Olympic Scandal

Interesting week in international sports. Lets start with the Champions League where once again we have a ‘choke-point’ where games are regularly fixed. Here is the scenario.  You are a UEFA investigator. The rest of the world thinks that you have unlimited resources and money coming out of your elbows. You know that if you’re lucky, the system will give you a bent paper clip and an elastic band for resources to stop corruption in Europe’s premier competition – the Champions...

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23Feb

The Cold War Spy Games Inside Sports

As the world fixates on Russian spying and cyber-attacks in U.S. politics, the field of sports has been struck by similar intrusions and Canadian athletes and organizations are among the hardest hit. The Montreal-based World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was warned last summer that Russian hackers were trying to breach its computer system, according to security officials and computer experts who requested anonymity to discuss the matter. The agency’s former director general, David Howman, who reported that he received death threats during...

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07Oct

How to Investigate Sports Corruption without upsetting the Senior Executives

Lets judge them using their own words. Today, (October 7) the Qatari-sponsored International Centre for Sports Security (ICSS) prepares to officially launch another alphabet soup of an organisation - the Sports Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA) or possibly they will announce a shift in their own organization's deck chairs while attempting to convince the sports world they should be taken seriously. The next day, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will continue their long, slow murder of the World Anti-Doing Agency (WADA). They...

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18Jan

Tennis Match-Fixing

Credible and good.  The Buzzfeed investigators - John Templon and Heidi Blake - should be congratulated. Three more facts. One, I was with a major monitor of sports gambling fixes.  They are experts in this world. Their people were estimating approximately one fixed match a week in the the tennis world. Two, I interviewed a player and then two senior investigators who told me that some tennis players make more money fixing games than playing honestly. Three, the secret reports that the story...

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10Nov

7 lessons from the IAAF and Russian Doping Scandals

So now we know. Now we know that the Russian anti-doping system in sport was largely a sham: a Potemkin village of a program designed to give the appearance of an effective fight but in reality enabling widespread doping among their athletes. Now we know that at the very heart of athleticism and the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) that was a deeply corrupted system that enabled doping athletes and coaches. Here are the lessons that we can learn: 1)    The myth...

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15Oct

7 Things to Know about the FIFA Scandal

Now that Sepp Blatter has been driven off into the sunset from FIFA, it is time to reflect on the long-sorry, scandal ridden years of his reign. Seven things then that we have learned: 1) The Watergate of Sports Stories: It was not ESPN, nor any of the other big sports channels or well-established sports journalists who broke the       FIFA story. The real heroes are a small collection of journalists who are largely outsiders. As the big sports media empires frantically...

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08Oct

FIFA – What Should Happen Now

Get Richard Pound in there asap. The news today of Sepp Blatter’s suspension shows the power of the sponsors.   Forget any police charges. Forget any bad publicity.   The reason why he is being shown the door is that some of the rich sponsors - finally, finally - came forward last week and asked for him to leave.  If they had done it years ago we might not be in this position. The question is what to do now? FIFA is still an...

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03Jun

10 Thoughts on Sepp Blatter’s Resignation

1-  There are lots of people in the FIFA world who are far, far worse than Blatter. 2- It is possible that after the next FIFA election we could wind up with a president who will make us feel nostalgic for Blatter. 3- Blatter and his group at Zurich ran effective protection for national football federations around the world when they faced criminal investigations for corruption. From Nigeria to Iran to Greece – when governments, police forces and law enforcement have...

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07Apr

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...

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