Russian doping scandal: In this darkest hour it is clean athletes who offer us hope

This was going to be an angry column, but to be brutally honest my heart is not in it. How can it be when suicide bombers assault a football match in a city awash with the blood of the innocent?

The scene of fear and disbelief after terrorists assaulted a football match in Paris on Friday (Getty Images)

No sooner had Russia been expelled from athletics’ league of nations on Friday night than attention was seized by unfolding horror on the streets of Paris. Due to that accident of timing, an issue which had once seemed so fundamental became utterly trivial.

Suddenly, the world is a darker, more perilous place. There is a search for substance amidst senselessness, a yearning for measured leadership and the principled application of power. It is a time to pause, reflect and recalibrate.

This was going to be an angry column, excoriating the hypocrites and opportunists who have hijacked world sport for their own ends, but to be brutally honest my heart is not in it. How can it be when suicide bombers assault a football match in a city awash with the blood of the innocent?

Sport can enrich, engage and uplift just as easily as it demeans, distracts and diminishes. It can enshrine definitive virtues, like charity, compassion, courage, decency, trust and respect, which tend to emerge, counter- intuitively, in daunting circumstances.

Better to accentuate the positive, by celebrating the human spirit in the form of those who have most to lose when corruption, through endemic doping, is state-sponsored but somehow intimate and individual.

Imagine yourself to be a clean athlete. Winter is beginning belatedly to announce itself. The alarm call is an existential crisis: do you still get up, ignore protesting muscles and a fuzzy-felt brain, or do you accept the futility of personal sacrifice in the face of overwhelming, unfair odds?

You will not recommit yourself to maximising your potential because of any intrinsic faith in Sebastian Coe, who has failed dismally to convince of his authenticity as a leader, despite attempts at reinvention by advisers first assembled at the London Olympics.

He must do more than talk tough in the absence of answers to uncomfortably pertinent questions about his culpability, as a 12-year veteran of the IAAF’s Byzantine political processes, to deserve your trust.

You will, by force of circumstance, be a realist. You will understand the prevailing cynicism that commercial pressures and geopolitical compromises will almost certainly lead to Russia being readmitted to the fold before next summer’s Rio Olympics. Part of you will reluctantly come to terms with that, because the thought of other clean competitors suffering from the grievous sins of their political masters pricks your conscience, no matter how ingrained your resistance to institutionalised cheating. There but for the Grace of God…

You know that nationality is no guide to venality. Doping needs no passport and respects no borders. This will get a lot worse before it gets a little better, because it is a global problem, across major and minority sports.

Too many of those who wrap themselves in the flag in moments of triumph have too much to hide. It might be a cloak of invisibility to the watching millions, but you have a painful grasp of its transparency.

Sport is a small world. You will have spoken with your peers, in whispers, of so-called “doping coaches”, who somehow avoid guilt by association. You will have heard of the doctors and sports scientists who have betrayed their calling. An ache, deep in your bones, signals your recognition of the champion who is a cheat.

When people like me loftily inform you of your higher duty, to become more militant and increasingly vocal, you will smile thinly, since you understand also that whistleblowers tend to be regarded as traitors rather than freedom fighters.

This is not the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning

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Amnesia, or myopia, are simply too convenient, since they guarantee a certain degree of self-protection. Those who accumulate allies and wield influence in corrupted major sporting organisations are notorious for their pettiness and vengeance.

The rage is there, though, volcanic magma bubbling beneath a crust of concern. What right does a rogue state, like Russia, have to colonise childhood, endanger health and create a chemically unbalanced athlete in the name of political prestige?

This is not the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning. You are braced for further confirmation of the black arts, supplied by Dick Pound, whose astringent independent investigating team gives you hope.

You believe in yourself. You take pride in your purity of purpose. You will do what you can within the limits of your natural talent and work ethic, to succeed on your own terms. For what it is worth, I, for one, salute you.

A heart-warming tale

Ochiroo Batbold is a 16-year-old Mongolian who answers to the nickname of Wazza, since his hero is Wayne Rooney. He kicks a football on his own in a school gym, incongruously decorated by logos for the London Olympics, for two hours before registration, and plays for Bayangol, a team co-owned by Paul Watson, a British coach and author.

Bayangol won the Mongolian Amateur Championship last month, and sat down to a celebratory meal at the end of the outdoor season, which lasts a mere three months because of the cold.

It was then that Ochiroo revealed he had been approached on Facebook by a fraudster, posing as an agent offering a trial for MLS club LA Galaxy.

His family, who live in a one-room yurt, a felt-lined tent, in the capital Ulaanbaatar, raised £3,800 on the strength of a poorly forged contract and a medical questionnaire.

They faced ruin before Watson, whose book Up Pohnpei brilliantly captures a previous life in charge of the Micronesian island team, organised a crowd-funding campaign on his behalf.

The tired old cliché of the football family immediately acquired meaning and impact. Fans across the UK sent cash and their best wishes, so that the debt was repaid, in full, on Thursday.

Watson will use any surplus to aid other victims of the scam, which involves stealing the identity of a legitimate US agent, and, bizarrely, that of a random Brazilian footballer, Fabiano Lima Rodrigues of Palmeiras.

Today, of all days, his cause seems noble, and the outcome a welcome reminder of redeeming human qualities.