The Evra/Suarez affair has almost tried my patience to the max. If it had merely been a case of Suarez saying something he shouldn’t have and swiftly apologising, that would have been one thing. The most sickening element is how racism has now been pulled into the mechanisms of Premier League football. For fans who defend Suarez, this isn’t merely about a man being wrongly accused of something (or though how you can be ‘wrongly accused’ of something you admit saying, I’m not sure), this is another manifestation of the Liverpool and Manchester United rivalry.

This has become so tribal as to be nonsensical. It seems people stand by Suarez because to do otherwise would be to concede that Evra is right, and that would be unthinkable due to the team he plays for. And so we get the perverse situation where Evra – a man who has reported the fact he has been racially abused, ie. done nothing wrong whatsoever – gets abuse from Liverpool fans. If I was a black footballer, would I feel more or less comfortable about speaking out about racism now? Almost certainly the latter.

This tribal mentality, that prevents football fans from stepping away from the game and seeing racism for what it is, hasn’t been left on the terraces. The fans have been ably egged on by the team’s manager. Dalglish’s attitude that Suarez did nothing wrong and shouldn’t have been banned at all is a disgrace and brings a huge amount of disrepute to a club I’ve personally always thought to be built on football’s best traditions and principles.

With the rise of the EDL and many people seeking easy solutions for the nation’s problems (namely blaming it on them immigrants) football should be doing all it can to say racism is bollocks. You’d think this would be an easy task given Premier League football’s manifestly multicultural nature, but it’s been made a whole lot harder by the attitudes of Liverpool and Dalglish. Instead of saying ‘kick it out’, Liverpool are saying ‘there are some occasions where racism could be deemed acceptable’.

You can already see the effects of this if you go on Twitter and search for Patrice Evra’s name and any racial slur you can think of. It seems the racists have leapt upon this and skewed the club’s line from ‘Luis is innocent’ to ‘Luis was right to racially insult a black man’. Unfortunately, this sort of attitude will continue to pervade unless we have a real zero tolerance approach to racism. Teams and fans shouldn’t be looking for excuses for it (“it’s acceptable in Uruguay”? please).

One thing that plays on my mind is how people would react if the roles were reversed, if, say, a Man Utd player had racially abused a Liverpool player. Would Liverpool fans attitude still be the same? Or would they be calling for the Man Utd player to be kicked out of the game? It seems the natural reaction is just to stand up for the multi-millionaire wearing the shirt of the team you support, no matter what.

Fans need to step away from the grotty world of football and see that racism can’t ever be excused or defended. It’s a lot bigger than a bullshit football rivalry and should be addressed as such.

The truth, though, is somewhat more nuanced. My understanding is that sports doping is not, in itself, a crime in America and certainly not one that would be pursued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the F.B.I and the Department of Justice.

Armstrong was never accused simply of doping. The doping may have formed the basis for a case involving fraud, or misuse of public money or any of the other charges it was rumoured Jeff Novitzky and his team were following, but not a crime on its own. Therefore, the investigation could, hypothetically, have thrown up evidence of doping and still been closed down if the attorney didn’t feel there was a strong enough case to make the serious charges stick. In other words, it’s not correct to say that this decision not to press charges vindicates Armstrong from doping. In the same way, perhaps, that the unsatisfactory conclusion to the recent Barry Bonds perjury trial does not exonerate him from taking steroids.

Those who, like cycling commentator Phil liggett, seek to conflate the issue of doping with the closure of the federal case have either not understood the procedure or are being deliberately disingenuous.

There may be an argument now to just let sleeping dogs lie, the issue of Armstrong’s doping will never fully be resolved and, surely, if there were that much evidence then the federal authorities would have pressed charges?  I had some sympathy with this viewpoint in the immediate aftermath of the news on Friday, but since then a number of news reports and anonymous sources have created many unanswered questions.

The most intriguing of these came today when Cyclingnews.com reported the US internet radio station NPR had spoken to “sources within the FBI, FDA and US Postal Services” who were “shocked, surprised and angry” that they were only given 30 minutes notice before the L.A. Attorney’s office informed the media the case would be closed. The NPR source also claimed that prosecutors were about to indict a number of individuals for fraud, witness tampering, mail fraud and drug distribution before the rug was seemingly pulled from under their feet.

This version of events was backed up by “a source who had co-operated with the federal investigation” who told Cyclingnews.com:

I talked to someone within the investigation but the reason why the case was shut down was due to a one man decision. The evidence against those involved was absolutely overwhelming. They were going to be charged with a slew of crimes but for reasons unexplained he closed the case saying it wasn’t open for discussion.

We can piece together from this, then, that Andre Birotte Jr made the decision on Friday to drop the case unilaterally, only giving the agencies investigating it a 30 minutes head start before the media was told. Birotte, in his position as Attorney for the Central District of California, is entirely within his rights to do this, but the source who have subsequently spoken out clearly do not agree that there was insufficient evidence. Indeed, Cyclingnews’s source believes the federal evidence was “absolutely overwhelming”.

Why, then, do we find ourselves in the situation we are in now? There could be any number of explanations why Birotte took the decision to drop the case quietly, the Friday before the Super Bowl (a time when the media are distracted with the football event of the year and may not have either the resources or the will to comprehensively follow up a legal case involving cycling). Could one explanation be that this was more a political decision than a judicial one? The more we look at the information available combined with the odd timing, the more we are compelled to ask just what exactly went on behind the scenes?

The team that Armstrong hired to defend himself certainly carries some political clout. His attorney Mark Fabiani, the man dubbed the ‘master of disaster’, is a former White House special counsel who, according to ESPN, “specializes in helping steer embattled politicians, companies and organizations through legal and public relations crises”. It was Fabiani who steered Bill and Hilary Clinton through the Whitewater scandal of the early 90s and was hired by Goldman Sachs in April 2010 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis to clean up its public image. The Financial Times described one of Fabiani’s main attributes as being “politically connected”.

Fabiani’s business partner Chris Lehane is similarly well connected and, it is reported, worked on a daily basis in the White House with Clinton’s lawyer Lanny Breuer, who is now Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice.

Before getting into full-blown conspiracy theory mode it’s maybe time to step back slightly and state that there’s no reason to believe anything untoward happened. Maybe a little lobbying went on here, a few old friends were lent on there, who knows. I do believe, however, that it’s worth highlighting the circles in which Armstrong and his team moved in, in order to view the case in a wider context.

If we take the Cyclingnews and NPR sources at their word then a U.S. Attorney has taken the decision to close down a case which those investigating it felt there was ‘overwhelming’ evidence to pursue. If that is what went on then there must surely be other factors involved. Would Birotte really want to spend the state’s time and money trying to prosecute someone as well connected as Armstrong? Did he really want to be the guy who sanctioned an investigation into how one of the world’s best known cancer charities spent its money? Did he decide, in the end, despite the evidence, the most politically expedient move would be to put a lid on the whole thing and move on? The timing of the decision could have come right out of the Fabiani PR playbook, as could the subsequent reports and comments trying to confuse the dropping of the Federal case with an acquittal from allegations of cheating in a bike race in France.

There may be more to come. In the meantime we can only speculate.

To counter this by saying, ” but he’s never tested positive” is to assume that cycling’s doping controls are absolute and will always catch the bad guys eventually. This didn’t happen with Jan Ulrich or the countless others who were caught out in Operation Puerto in 2006. Britain’s golden boy David Millar never tested positive, yet in 2004 police raided his room in Biaritz and found used syringes and two empty phials of EPO.

Basically, I could write a lengthy blogpost on why I think Armstrong doped, but I’d like to assume that every reasonable person, unburdened by the trappings of fandom, can look at the facts dispassionately and come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to believe he did it clean, however good a story it would make. There’s the testimonys from former teammates where doping regimes are described in detail, there’s his association with the controversial Michele Ferrari (which, according to Italian police, continued in secret until at least 2010 after Ferrari’s arrest in 2004), and then, of course, there’s the context. The rivals who were snarled at, crushed and firmly put in their place were all using EPO and transfusing blood, Armstrong rode and dominated in cycling’s dirtiest era and we are asked to believe his success was a result of talent and mental strength winning out over pharmaceutically enhanced opponents.

Those who hoped that the federal investigation launched into Armstrong and doping in US cycling would come up with charges and, ultimately, convictions were hopefully not all crossing their fingers out of bitterness or a bloody-minded vindictive desire to see a hero fall.

Instead, we wanted the truth to come out. Cycling cannot progress if its future is built on fairytales. We need to go back and honestly address what went wrong, why riders doped, who knew what and how it can be stopped in the future. The alternative to this, as far as I can see, is to shout loud about the guys who get caught out and bring the full force of scorn and indignation down on their shoulders. Sometimes these guys end up like Floyd Landis, where a confession relieves them of their burden, other times they end up like Marco Pantani. The common factor between the two is that they are suddenly ostracised and disowned by a sport and culture that nurtured them, taught them to act this way by institutionalising the act of doping, and then threw them to the wolves.

In Floyd Landis’s opinion, only a total amnesty can save cycling now. Ask riders to reveal how they dope, how they avoid testing positive and in return offer immunity from punishment. Understand a little more, condemn a little less, in other words. The sport needs to understand its problems before it can confront them fully. Landis has helped with this and he should be applauded for eventually doing the right thing, but the sport should make provisions for others to follow his lead, not brief the press that those who break cycling’s great omerta are liars or psychologically unbalanced.

To talk about this in abstract terms is fine, but the huge barrier standing in the way is cycling’s survival as a commercial entity. If it stops one day and says ‘actually, all this is a lie and we cannot say for sure that any of these athletes are clean’ the money would run out overnight. Which sponsor wants to have their name on the jersey of a cheat? Who wants their brand to be associated with lies and corruption? Where would the funding come from?

This is why cycling seemingly must carry on as it is, and why there will be huge sighs of relief in the offices of the UCI at the news no charges will be brought against the man who rejuvinated the sport after the Festina scandal in 1998, when pundits where openly questioning whether the Tour de France could survive. Cycling enjoyed some glorious commercial success in the years from 1999-2005, even if the racing itself was stolid and largely unexciting, the buccaneering daring of the Hinault, Lemond and Fignon era replaced by the machinelike, regimented performances of Armstrong’s US Postal team, leading from the front and grinding down opponents into submission.  To admit that this commercial renaissance was built on a lie would leave the governing body, and many others, open to numerous awkward questions they’d presumably all rather leave in the past.

There are certain n0-go areas in cycling, and Armstrong is definitely one of them. For that reason I can’t answer the question I’ve laid out in the title to this blogpost. I hope that the US Anti-Doping Agency, as they have pledged, carry out a thorough probe into doping practises and receive all the evidence which now won’t be used in the federal investigation. I hope they build their investigation on finding out the truth, no matter what, rather than a damage limitations exercise with one eye on keeping the golden goose laying eggs just a little bit longer.

I hope the truth comes out eventually because I want to believe in cycling a bit more. And, I think possibly more than that, I want the courage of Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton who did a lot of disgraceful things and told a lot of lies but eventually spoke out against a culture of denial, to count for something. I don’t want the PR machine to spin into overdrive and declare that Armstrong has been found not guilty and that Landis and Hamilton have been proved to have been lying, because no such thing has happened, no trial has taken place.

Cheating is probably more commonplace than we’d like to believe and once something has been set in motion its hard to stop. I’m not even sure doping can be seen in such absolute terms as a matter of right and wrong. Christophe Bassons found being ‘right’ was hard, as he was mocked by his teammates for refusing to take the doping products which they all used.  If you want to succeed in the sport, you’re probably going to need to do more than ride clean and hope for a break, particularly in an event that spans three weeks. And isn’t that what sport is about anyway? Finding a way to succeed. That’s not a justification of doping, it’s just a question. But it’s a question that needs to be answered, along with a lot of others, if cycling is to lay its demons to rest for once and for all.

Floyd Landis

Robertson and his government’s silence is particularly striking, given that page 14 of the Coalition Agreement, set out by the Conservatives and Lib Dems in May 2010, contains an express commitment to “encourage the reform of football governance rules to support the co-operative ownership of football clubs by supporters“.

Robertson then reaffirmed this aim in September of last year in a debate in Westminster Hall on the governance of football, saying:

The twin aims of greater supporter involvement in running football clubs and the reform of football governance are shared across the political spectrum and are, as the hon. Gentleman correctly said, part of the coalition agreement. However, I have to tell him that, although the issue is widely agreed in this place, it is not entirely shared in the wider football family. There is a battle to be fought to convince the football family of the merits of this case.

A battle to be fought, indeed, and yet Robertson’s failure to act when an essential component of supporter involvement in football clubs becomes compromised is disappointing.

Further to this, when Robertson – a former army major and investment banker – was an opposition MP, he was a key note speaker at the Supporters Direct Conference in October 2008. Robertson told the conference of the Conservative’s belief in “empowering local communities” (recently re-expressed as  a key tenet of David Cameron’s “Big Society”), congratulated SD on their success so far, wished them luck for the future and assured them they had the full support of the Conservative Party.

In addition to his silence in the press, Robertson is also yet to sign an Early Day Motion in Parliament, tabled by the Labour MP Tom Greatrex, which criticises the Premier League’s decision to withdraw funding. Greatrex wrote on his website today that:

The Sports Minister, Hugh Robertson MP, recently described football as the worst governed sport in the country. He must now step in to protect the future of Supporters Direct, which has advanced the cause of good governance and transparency in the national game so much. The government must prove that it is not just paying lip service to the voice of football fans and use its influence to urge the FSIF to re-consider.

It’s hard to argue with that, regardless of whether you are to the left or the right of the political spectrum.

Greatrex and Robertson, it seems, have crossed paths on this issue before. On 16th June last year Robertson told Greatrex in a written answer that the government had no plans to provide funding for SD itself, a position that seems consistent with the coalition’s commitment to big society, not big government. With this in mind, it seems even more essential that Robertson act on his earlier pledges, follow through on his government’s stated wish to enable local communities to have a greater say in the running of local bodies, and speak out against the Premier League’s decision to withdraw their funding from Supporters Direct.

Supporters Direct, the group set up in 2000 to help football fans struggle for greater accountability and democracy within their teams, as well as helping fans run their own teams, had its funding withdrawn by the Premier League, reneging on a previous commitment to provide £1.8m of funding over the next three years.

But for what reason? Had there been allegations of bungs, bribes, corruption, as has been levelled at the upper echelons of FIFA? What great scandal was it that appalled the Premier League so that they felt they had to withdraw their funding pledge? Well, it seems that messers Scudamore, Richards and co. were unhappy with SD chief exec Dave Boyle using swear words on Twitter whilst celebrating AFC Wimbledon’s promotion to the Football League.

In the manner of Mary Whitehouse, or a particularly pernickity conservative pensioner watching a stand-up comedy DVD, the PL decided that swearing would not be tolerated and Supporters Direct chair Pauline Green had not sufficiently reprimanded Boyle for his Twitter outburst, so the money that had previously been pledged to the organisation would no longer be available.

Who knew that the Premier League had such stringent moral guidelines? They seemed to be strangely absent when Thakshin Shinawatra was allowed to purchase Manchester City, or when the son of a then-wanted arms dealer bought Portsmouth FC; or, indeed, in the debt-laden takeover of Manchester United.  All of these ethically questionable actions, which knaw at the credibility of our national game, were allowed to pass without comment but swearing, it seems, was a step too far.

But the decision to stop Supporters Direct dead in its tracks is more than just another example of Premier League incompetence. In an age where Football League clubs are going bust like never before, SD is a vital organisation that helps the fans put their views front and centre and makes them a force to be reckoned with again. It is a voice of the fans which had previously gone unheard in a world of clubs and governing bodies making solely commercial considerations.

SD had helped establish 200 supporters trusts and it looked like we were entering a decade where ventures like these were making real, demonstrable progress. For instance, not only have fan-owned AFC Wimbledon entered the Football League, but Swansea City, whose supporters trust has a 20% share in the club and a full-time representative on the board, have been promoted to the Premier League. These need to set new precedents in fan-ownership, not just be quaint anomalies. The cutting of funding to SD goes against this great endeavour and helps the commercial side of the game gain an upper-hand on the fans once more.

The closest we got to a recognition of the storm which had been gathering all weekend in FIFA’s executive committee was his concession that, yes, there had been “difficulties” but, no, despite the suspensions of Mohammed bin Hammam and Jack Warner, and corruption allegations being levelled from high ranking members of FIFA, this was not a crisis.

It was, in many ways, an astounding exercise in brassnecked denial.

On the BBC’s Newsnight programme on Friday, Tony Blair’s former head of communications Alastair Campbell – a man who knows a thing or two about manoeuvring out of a crisis – predicted that if Blatter could see out the next few days then he would sail through Wednesday’s elections and win four more years as FIFA president. Sure enough, the ex-spin doctor looks to be right. Amazingly, Blatter enters Wednesday’s elections in better shape than he was four days ago, his only rival for presidency has withdrawn and, barring any more allegations, a Blatter election victory is a mere formality.

The very fact that Blatter can get away with this, with only an internal “ethics committee” deciding whether or not he has a case to answer, shows up a very serious failure in FIFA as an organisation, and it is, needless to say, something which must be addressed if we are to bring about reform.

The very first way we should be looking to reform FIFA is to bring about a change that is so fundamental it almost goes without saying – FIFA must be a democracy.

The British Labour Party politician Tony Benn said that in a democracy we should ask the powerful five questions:

1. What power have you got?

2. Where did you get it from?

3. In whose interests do you exercise it?

4. To whom are you accountable?

5. How can we get rid of you?

“Only democracy gives us that right” Benn stated, “that is why no-one with power likes democracy”. The latter part of that statement seems particularly pertinent when looking at FIFA.

We, as football fans, cannot ask those questions of Blatter, nor can we elect anyone to ask them on our behalf. Geoff Thompson, the only British person who holds a high-ranking position in the organisation, seems too ingrained in his role as FIFA vice-president to question Blatter’s ethics. Thompson was part of the World Cup 2018 bid team that had the temerity to label the BBC “an embarrassment” when they ran a programme presented by the journalist and author Andrew Jennings outlining FIFA corruption allegations. Thompson then personally signed a letter to the FIFA executive committee from the bid team, distancing themselves from the BBC and saying “as a member of the football family we naturally feel solidarity with you and your colleagues”.

If we could ask those questions of FIFA, however, then what would the answers be? We probably know the answers to questions 1 and 2 well enough but question 3 is a little more tricky. In whose interest does Blatter and the rest of FIFA exercise their power? Is it in the interests of the fans, or is Blatter merely a manager of football capitalism?

To try and answer this I want to look at an example. At the last World Cup, some fans accused of “guerilla marketing” (ie. attending games wearing logos of companies who weren’t official sponsors of the tournament) were marched off to sinister sounding Kafkaesque “FIFA courts” – an entirely undemocratic institution which seemed to have higher authority than the host country’s own law courts.

This may seem bizarre but, when viewed in the context of FIFA’s globalised marketing scheme, it starts to look like less of an anomaly. Whilst awarding the World Cup to countries such as South Africa and Brazil is seen as an act of benevolence on FIFA’s part to let different nations get a taste of the World Cup action, it could also be seen as an economic expansionist policy ensuring those at the top make a tidy profit. To host a World Cup, a country has to first agree to relax its tax laws for  FIFA and its associated parties, meaning that anyone who pays enough money to FIFA can get in on this deregulated free-for-all. No wonder the “guerilla marketers” who dare to try and intrude on this commercial hegemony face such tough retribution.

Whilst you may argue the rights and wrongs of this free market approach to football’s commercial side, if Blatter was fully accountable he would have to work harder to prove to football fans that this represnted FIFA working in their interests, and not merely the interests of a rich minority who own shares in corporations.

Moving on to questions 4 and 5: “to whom are you accountable?” and “how do we get rid of you?” The answers seem, sadly, all too predictable: “no one” and “you can’t” would probably be the most honest response.

Accountability, then, should be next on the agenda for FIFA reform, and with this would come a way of getting rid of those in power. At the moment FIFA seems to be able to act in any way it want. One of the advantages of being based in Switzerland, as well as the generous tax breaks, is that they do not have to abide by the country’s anti-corruption legislation. They are, in effect, not even accountable to the law.

It is a sad state of affairs that, in the absence of any proper mechanisms to hold FIFA to account, we now have to ask FIFA’s sponsors – themselves multi-national corporations who have profited from Blatter’s reign as president – to have an unlikely attack of conscience and withdraw their association with football’s governing body, as Sports Illustrated journalist and FIFA reformist Grant Wahl has urged people to do on Twitter. As we have already seen, FIFA have proved themselves adept at negotiating tax breaks for their affiliates – in Brazil, FIFA and their partners are, incredibly, exempt from tax on any World Cup goods and services for a full five years from January this year – which presents companies with little incentive to give up these deregulated perks purely in the name of making a moral stand.

Having said all this, it’s certainly reassuring that people are beginning to see the need for reform and are starting to demand it. On the day of Blatter’s press conference, one of the top trending topics around the world on Twitter was the hashtag #blatterout. But we, as mere fans, are unable to make that happen, our voice is not heard by FIFA, and the depressing fact is that even if Blatter did go we would still not necessarily be any closer to a more democratic governing body. It is, ultimately, the structures and mechanisms of power that need to be replaced, not just the president. With a system like the current one it is no wonder that football’s corridors of power seem so rife with corruption.

What followed was the usual kind of tabloid feeding frenzy we see whenever there is a new story about a celebrity’s private life, but this particular episode was injected with the added drama of the super-injunction imposed suspense.

Anyone with an inquisitive mind and a Twitter account could have found out who the “well-known Premiership footballer” appearing in the papers only in silhouette was long before Hemming got up to speak. If Twitter wasn’t conclusive enough, hints were dropped in the Daily Mail and Private Eye at least a week in advance.

Football fans – not just Manchester United fans – furrowed their brows and exchanged solemn words across Twitter at all of  this. How base this seemed, to be speculating on someone’s private life – who cares? There came to the fore a school of thought that the Giggs affair was not just distasteful because of the man’s conduct, but because of the false actions of the newspapers and MP who uncovered it. Giggs even seemed to be painted as a victim in some circles – one man unable to hold back the tide of tabloid tittle-tattle and a celebrity-obsessed culture hungry for gossip.

Whilst there is some truth in this, it does seem to miss the point somewhat. It’s an inarguable truth that for The Sun and the Daily Mail to paint themselves as crusaders fighting for the noble value of freedom of speech is absolutely laughable, but this does not mean that what has happened isn’t a victory for values we should hold dear – not just for a free press, but also for a communal freedom of speech via Twitter.

If the Giggs affair had been successfully super-injunctioned what would that mean? It would mean that the law had been bent and shaped in such a way so that those with money were effectively free to pick and chose which of their misdemeanours made it into the public arena. Yes, Giggs wanted to keep his private life out of the newspapers and, yes, there is a huge financial imperative for tabloids to print these stories, but there is another element to this story too. As with the unfolding of the Tiger Woods affair in 2009, a sex scandal causes more than just embarrassment for a sportsman. It causes considerable commercial damage as well. Woods took time to apologise for his actions soon after the story broke and women who had spent a steamy night with the banal golfer were appearing in the press left, right and centre. But his apology appeared more concerned with making amends to his sponsors than expressing genuine regret, or reaching out to his young fans who may be left disillusioned. Woods subsequently was deemed “not the right representative” for a number of products that had previously been flogged bearing his name and image and, as a result, the Woods brand was changed and damaged irreparably.

Giggs too has commercial interests, just like any top flight footballer, were his image and brand at the forefront of his and Schilling’s – his legal representatives – minds when they went to the courts seeking a super-injunction? If so, why should the law be used to protect the commercial interests of the rich? Is this a fundamentally fair system? This alone is reason enough why this case is not merely a polarised affair between high-minded fans and gutter-press journalism.

The next step in this unusual quest for privacy taken by Giggs and Schillings was even more of a rank insult to those of us who value being able to communicate freely via the internet – to launch a lawsuit against those who dared name him on Twitter. This ill-thought out tactic was important, again not because anyone necessarily gave the tiniest shit about Giggs’s philandering, but because it could potentially set a dangerous precedent.

If Giggs had succeeded in forcing Twitter to close down accounts which breached his vanity and commercial-based super-injunction then what ramification would this have held for the future of the social media platform? Already Twitter has been used for noble causes such as the Arab Spring movements across the Middle East and the #spanishrevolution protests in Madrid and even in England with the #ukuncut movement – its use comes as an effective way to communicate and co-ordinate action.

This may seem an extreme example to use in contrast to a footballer who had an affair with a small time celebrity, but if Twitter can be censored over sex scandals then this sets the precedent for censoring for any number of reasons. Is it conceivable that whilst a dictator struggles to seize back control of their unruly population and the western powers are caught short and left floundering over who to support, pressure could come for Twitter to clamp down on protester’s tweets?

You might think that this is absurd, but it was already happened with mobile phone technology. In Egypt in January, as Hosni Mubarak sought to nullify the revolutionary protesters standing in Tahrir Square, the nation’s Vodafone customers suddenly found they had no signal on their mobile phones. The Mubarak government had requested Vodafone close down its network and the company had obliged, and thus a key way of co-ordinating protest action- of finding friends, family and merely keeping safe – was lost.

The point being – if censorship starts here then where does it end? Whilst the Giggs scandal has been a murky war, fought on one side by a man who cheated on his wife and on the other by media moguls keen to shift extra copies of their newspapers, it is nevertheless important. No one should be able to use the law to protect their commercial interests, and no one should be able to censor freedom of speech on the internet. It is not morally consistent for those who criticise the way the Giggs affair has played out to then (rightly) put the boot into Fred Goodwin, who was also named by Hemming in the commons but holds the (dis)advantage of being much more of an archetypal ‘bad guy’. If we seek to defend Giggs we seek to defend the rich’s right to different laws and rights of privacy than the rest of us. Just because he is a great footballer, he shouldn’t be given the sympathy of any football fans over this.

This list was leaked, presumably from someone in the UCI, to the French sports daily L’equipe who published it this morning. It’s basically a “suspicion list”, for want of a better term, that doctors gave to the UCI before the start of the Tour de France 2010 showing which riders they think displayed signs of possibly doping.

(credit to Bobby Lightspeed)

According to L’equipe, riders in the 4-10 categories are the ones testers should take notice of. Don’t draw too many conclusions from this, it’s certainly not a list of who is and who isn’t doping, more just a guide for who to test.

All of this is based on rider’s biological passports – a collection of data based on blood samples taken at different times which can be looked at collectively. If a rider’s blood levels differ from one test to another, or there are any other anomalies, then this may be evidence that they are doping and should be examined closer.  They can highlight things like fluctuating hematocrit levels and haemoglobin levels, which could indicate the use of doping products to aid recovery and create red blood cells to produce more oxygen.

The biological passport is something I believe FIFA should implement worldwide. The logistics are obviously tricky – there are far more professional footballers in the world than there are professional cyclists – but if it could be brought in initially for, say, every player in England and Spain’s top divisions then it would be a really worthwhile project and show FIFA were serious about their anti-doping message. It’s something they have “considered” in the past but, to my knowledge, have yet to do anything about.

For this to happen there, of course, needs to be more blood testing done. I’ve read various FA pdf files that outline their approach to anti-doping and a real roadblock seems to be the fact blood testing is expensive. In a game which is so awash with money at the top level this really shouldn’t be a problem. Sponsors could be encouraged to put money into an anti-doping pool that could be used effectively or, alternatively, FIFA could channel more of its revenue into this area of the game.

People might ask: why address a problem that doesn’t exist? Surely the only reason cycling is so far ahead of football in blood testing and the biological passport is because it is a dirtier sport? Well, for a start we don’t know that football is cleaner than cycling. I’ve written about examples in the past where top footballers have been found using exactly the same doping products as cyclists (namely EPO) but, for whatever reason, not much has been made of it. In addition to this, anti-doping rules shouldn’t be reactionary measures, they should be preventive. Why wait until you have a doping problem before doing anything about it? Isn’t it best to act early to prevent doping ever becoming an issue?

In the wake of even more FIFA corruption allegations this week Sepp Blatter could really clean up his imagine by taking  anti-doping seriously. For a man who says he wants to “take a step ahead in the fight against doping” he’s been very inactive thus far. In a medical report on FIFA’s website in August 2007 it was revealed that no blood testing took place at the 2006 World Cup whatsoever, despite having taken place at the 2002 World Cup. The reason given for this was:

Laboratory experts advised against taking blood tests, since given current levels of medical advancement, they would not be able to provide any further information. The blood tests taken at the 2002 FIFA World Cup did not throw up any abnormal results.

I find this baffling. Blood tests are more effective than urine tests, that’s been shown in sports like cycling and athletics for years. I’m sure that WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) would argue FIFA’s suggestion that blood tests couldn’t provide any more information than urine tests, and the logic that there weren’t any “abnormal results” four years previously so testing is now unnecessary is perverse, to say the least.

In my opinion, despite the obvious flaws in cycling’s “suspicion list” (and, remember, the list was never meant to be published), football could still take a few cues here and move towards being more responsible. Blood testing is needed in the sport on a far more regular basis than currently happens. Then, through the biological passport, governing bodies can get a more accurate picture of who to test and whether or not players are clean.

Lord Triesman, having a right old natter earlier today.

During the questioning Triesman made four serious accusations about members of FIFA’s executive committee, based around the familiar story of bribes and how they influence excom member’s votes when it comes to deciding who hosts the World Cup.

Rightly, this caused a lot of excitement amongst the press  but one other piece of information Triesman revealed seems to have gone wholly unreported (or so it seems after a quick Google news search) except for on Channel 4 News here in the UK.

When asked about a recording sold to a newspaper on which he discusses accusations of Spanish and Russian officials seeking to bribe referees (and which subsequently lost him his job as chairman of the FA and chief of the 2018 bid) Triesman goes into more detail about where he got the information from. The video of the hearing is on the select committee’s website but, as I’ve not seen it reported anywhere else, it’s probably worth putting up the transcript so as to avoid any inaccuracies:

Triesman: I’d been approached by a Spanish investigative journalist who wanted to put to me a number of things which he wanted to know I’d either heard about or believed might be happening here. He was writing what I assumed would be a pretty substantive story which covered manipulation of referees and also covered questions of avoiding the doping regulations in Spanish sport. As I understood it he had access to the tape of a discussion which a Spanish investigating magistrate had managed to get hold of in which some of these things appear to have been discussed between fairly senior people in Spain. I didn’t put it in my list because even a good and serious journalist coming along with a story of that kind might very well not be accurate, might be a rumour. I wasn’t really prepared and I said it was among the more fanciful things I’d heard.

Channel 4 News lead their report of Triesman’s testimony with this information (strange, seeing as doping is only actually mentioned once), coupled with footage of police investigators removing blood bags from fridges, presumably during the raid of a doping lab.

I wrote a while back about how questions about doping in Spanish football had never really been answered, particularly after the anecdotal evidence that came out of Operation Puerto from both Dr. Fuentes himself and cyclist Jesus Manzano (all that’s in the “Il Drogati” article linked in the first sentence too, just it’d look stupid if I linked to it again!). Add to this a story I found recently that claimed French newspaper Le Monde (who made the Lance Armstrong doping allegations in 2005) obtained documents that suggested Fuentes was working with players from Barcelona and Real Madrid. The claims were subsequently retracted after Barca and Real threatened legal action.

Similar rumblings came to the fore again recently when FC Barcelona were forced to defend themselves against doping allegations made by Spanish radio station Cadena Cope who reported that some of Barca’s physicians were less than reputable (I can’t read Spanish so was relying on the Google Chrome translation, maybe the accusation sounds stronger in its original language). They were possibly referring to Dr. Ramon Segura who is a club physician and who was previously Pep Guardiola’s doctor when he tested positive for nandrolone whilst playing for Brescia in 2001, and was also involved in the positive test given by Frank de Doer. It’s obviously worth pointing out that Guardiola was later cleared of doping by the Italian Olympic Committee in 2009.

So, obviously my ears pricked up when Triesman mentioned a tape that may or may not feature “fairly senior people in Spain” discussing how to avoid doping regulations. We know from cycling it’s actually pretty easy to avoid doping regulations if you have a good doctor; it’s messy, involves blood transfusions and masking agents, but it can be done and is seemingly almost second nature to those well-verse in the dark arts of doping.

My impression from Channel 4 News’s report tonight suggested that they had seen/heard the tapes Triesman referred to as well and (this is the speculative bit) the parliamentary privilege that allowed Triesman to mention what might otherwise be libellous remarks meant that Channel 4 News could report some of what they knew.

That’s only an educated guess, I wish 4 on demand put Channel 4 News on their service so I could watch the report again but, annoyingly, I can’t. Certainly the impression I got was that this tape had been seen by them.

Will anything more come of this? Quite possibly not. A glimmer of hope may come from Italy where a local magistrate has carried out a seemingly large-scale doping raid on the back of the work done by the federal investigation in America headed up by Jeff Novitsky. It sometimes seems, though, that it is left to police and local authorities to carry out the anti-doping work that should be done by sport’s governing bodies.

It’s interesting how these same accusations keep coming up again and again. It could well be that they’re just rumours designed to discredit what is undeniably a footballing nation at the zenith of its abilities right now, not to mention Spain’s success in other sports. But they always seem to lead back to the same question of whether or not Spain – and football in general – is doing enough to make absolutely sure that doping doesn’t take place. I hope it is, but I have my doubts.