Life goes on

On the day when FIFA is due to publish a summary of its ethics committee’s report by US lawyer Michael Garcia into the controversial bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 Word Cups, it is perhaps unfair to bring attention to some of the embarrassments facing another leading global sport – golf.

By all media accounts, the Garcia report will provide a ‘whitewash’ fig-leaf defence of how Russia and Qatar won their soccer World Cups. His investigation will apparently manage to do this via the entirely coincidental means of (1) various key parties refusing to co-operate with it’s work and then (2) spraying allegations of a range of minor misdemeanours against many of those (including the English Football Association) who did.

Well, fancy that!

The National Rust is proud to have taken a consistent strong line on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.

Although historically athletics and cycling have rightly been regularly in the frame in this respect, perhaps understandably there are few administrative bodies (sporting or otherwise) that are lily-white pure in terms of transparently airing their dirty linen in public.

Human nature inevitably dictates that whenever a potential scandal erupts, those in charge tend to circle their wagons, assess their best PR route to ‘damping down’, parrying or ‘killing’ the problem and then try to execute it.

Sometimes this strategy works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Here’s a link to an article published today on the website of the Daily Telegraph by its Chief Sports Feature Writer Oliver Brown – PGA TOUR’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS