Sporting politics likely to ensure Russians will roll up in Rio

What kind of person wakes up one morning and thinks sports politics is the way to go?

Okay, sports administration, regulation, governance, whatever sounds best: but its politics really. Who looks at the wide world of sport and thinks yup, that’s the bit for me? It’s like being the head pedicurist’s junior foot-scraper at a fashion-show: yes, someone’s got to do it, and there’s a faint whiff of trickle-down glamour, but still...

Maybe the fat, wheezy and hopelessly uncoordinated reckon it’s their best chance of getting in on the act, and the free-tickets, and, maybe, even the girl. But there must be more to it than that.

It sure isn’t popularity. Referees are sport’s supermodels in comparison. If there’s venom, and bile to up-chuck, everyone reflexively gags towards the suit. They’re piñatas for every smart-arse with an axe to grind. From the top of the IOC to the bottom of the most humble GAA Cumann, the suit is always to blame. So, why put yourself through that wringer?

Scotland's former First Minister, Alex Salmond recently came up with a natty definition of this impulse. "Vanity for a purpose," he called it, a neat line, although hardly neat enough to convince anyone bar those eager to be convinced since rare is the high-ranking politician whose purpose isn't power for vanity's sake.

Perhaps scaling any greasy pole inevitably means purpose is reduced to political self-interest, in sport too where altruistic expressions of volunteerism can sound like cant the higher you go and actual games are reduced to being the chips played in boardroom games which often reduce credibility to rubble.

Betting manipulation

There’s little other way, for instance, to look at reports of the International Tennis Federation’s handling of how a couple of umpires have been secretly banned, with four others facing corruption charges, all of which the ITF kept under wraps until allegations of betting manipulation hit the fan.

This is the body charged with maintaining the integrity of tennis and it kept details of betting corruption to itself, presumably in the hope that if no one found out then what was the point in making a stink

It is a ludicrous position that would be laughable if it wasn’t a pervasive attitude amongst so many governing bodies which are supposedly regulating while simultaneously promoting.

Guess which side most politicos who’ve shinned their way to the top instinctively jump when it comes to purposefully imposing integrity or promoting their vanity? What is ultimately supposed to be about protecting the values of fair play too often becomes mere containment and justification, a giant exercise in pious arse-covering.

That it fools no one doesn’t seem to matter. That it tears the foundation out of public confidence appears as irrelevant as reminders that sport might be ultimately about athletes rather than suits at the top. Not that there’s some automatic neat distinction between the two. There are no convenient good guys and bad guys here, just different rules and techniques to be learned.

There was a time when Michel Platini was football's white knight riding to the rescue, no fat, wheezy suit like the dastardly Sepp, but a genuine sporting hero. And then Platini gets banned for accepting a disloyal payment from Blatter, his reputation swallowed by the new game.

It will be fascinating if Platini ever outlines the how and why and when of that diversion but he’s so politically fluent now it might be too blurry for even him to acknowledge it.

Lord Sebastian Coe is notably fluent too, and appears particularly fond of himself, hardly surprising as he possesses a supreme athletics pedigree, and a political record that was lustrous before it became even more notable after making it to the top of the IAAF.

The saga of Coe replacing the “spiritual president” Lamine Diack after a doggedly skilful campaign has been documented to exhaustion, as has the subsequent WADA report into systemic doping in Russia and corruption within the IAAF.

That the WADA report simultaneously outlined how the IAAF council, including Coe, could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics, and also proclaimed the Englishman as the perfect figure to repair the IAAF’s reputational damage, is the sort of dainty two-step that provokes admiring boardroom chortles.

Plaintive tone

So within the IAAF bubble, Coe probably was unaware last week of just how jarring it sounded to throw out accusations of hypocrisy at the food company Nestle who pulled the sponsorship plug on a Children’s Athletics Programme.

It’s the kids who’ll suffer was Coe’s plaintive tone, no doubt pleased with the chance to slalom his way through the spin slopes on the front foot for a change, and probably not particularly bothered that most of it would fail to convince anyone.

This increasingly yawning and dangerous disconnect was further emphasised last week when the head of the Russian Olympic Council reassuringly announced that team doctors have told him they are fully prepared to cope with the Zika virus in Rio this August.

Set that alongside predictions of an IAAF-appointed task force recommending to the IAAF that Russia’s international ban be imposed through the Olympics and it’s hard to blame anyone for cynically predicting the Russians will be in Rio.

If they are it will be the ultimate slap to even an aspiration towards fair play. It’s hard not to suspect Coe’s instinct will be towards compromise, especially with the political and economic considerations involved. Pulling it off would be a massive boost to his vanity. But should it happen, purpose will again have been reduced to the merely cosmetic.