Archives for September 2011

One of the more absurd things I've heard Sepp Blatter say is that football doesn't have a drugs problem.

It was a while ago that he offered that observation, at the time when Fifa and World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) were wrestling over compliance with the world anti-doping code, and how they would manage disciplinary measures. I was never convinced that football had actually embraced the code fully, but Wada seemed satisfied in the end.

Blatter's remarks seemed to be entirely based, at the time, on a lack of positive drug tests at successive major tournaments. (Before, incidentally, the recent Women's World Cup where five members of the North Korean team failed tests for performance enhancing drugs, resulting in the team's ban from the next competition in Canada in 2015.)

It's an absurd remark because football and footballers are no different from any other sport, in that where there's financial reward for success, there's doping. To deny that because no-one's been caught is meaningless. We all know sprinter Marion Jones never failed a drugs test, but by her own admission, was a cheat.

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