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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05Nov

Strategic Deception and the Sporting World

How the UNODC and IOC have created a movement that purports to fight sports corruption but actually puts it in reverse. ”The West are wishful thinkers, we will give them what they want to think…” Feliks Dzerzhinsky - Founder of the Soviet Spy Services Back in the day, things were not going well for the Russian Bolsheviks. It was 1919, they were nominally in power in the newly established, Soviet Russia, but really were losing a land war to their bitter enemies...

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16Oct

How to Survive an International Sports Integrity Conference

You ain’t in Kansas anymore Dorothy. Back in the day, international sports integrity conferences - like Play the Game, happening right now in Colorado Springs - were jovial affairs where independent journalists, saddened whistle-blowers and beleaguered sports officials could meet, chat, drink and sometimes dance. Now, everything has changed. Sports are battle grounds of geopolitical soft power. Hard power is the idea that you can conquer another country with tanks, planes and lots of death. Soft power is the idea that you can...

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18Sep

The Sporting Scandals of the Season

It is in the dog days of summer that the dirty deeds get done. A good habit for European and North American investigative journalists is to check government press releases at the beginning of the July 1st/4th weekend and the Friday before the Christmas Holidays. For it is then, when most people are rushing out the door for their holidays, that bad news emerges from guilty corporations, complicit government departments and cunning media spokes people. In sports corruption, the equivalent are...

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06Feb

The Russian Olympic Doping File

It is a slow-moving disaster than penalizes clean athletes and rewards a dirty system. Welcome to the Russian state sponsored doping saga, episode number 58. ** Here is some context. For those readers who do not follow the fast, exciting world of winter sports in the Virgin Islands – the beach training is intense and the air conditioning can be very cold – you may have missed the sad news of Ms. Kathryn Tannenbaum, the skeleton sledder from those temperate isles. Skeleton sledding is...

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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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01Aug

If You Love Sports, Switch Off the Rio Olympics

Ten Points on the Russian Sports Doping Scandal 1. The only way to get clean, dope-free sport is for fans around the world to switch off the Rio de Janeiro Olympics: I do not write this lightly. Nor do I write about the rampant corrupton of the Brazilian construction industry, the potential spread of the Zika virus, the dangerous raw sewage that some of the athletes are being forced to compete in, the violence of the local police/criminals, the bulldozing of...

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