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Vitaly Mutko’s Life Ban: The IOC matches its bark with some bite

At its meeting on 5 December 2017, the IOC’s Executive Board met to consider the Schmid Report, its own commissioned report on the Russian doping question, produced for the Disciplinary Commission (DC) by a panel chaired by Samuel Schmid, a member of the IOC Ethics Committee and a former President of the Swiss Confederation. [1] This is a relatively short report, in part due to the decision taken by the DC to avoid “differentiation between confidential and non-confidential information”, as it was considered inappropriate “to publish only a part of the documentation upon which” the commission’s conclusions are based. [2] The report is offered, therefore, as a synthesis of the findings, somewhat shorn of evidence as none of the actual documentation or oral testimonies newly received by the investigation are included or quoted

Half of the report comprises a review of earlier reports, much of which focuses upon Richard McLaren’s two Independent Reports to WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency). A particular assertion in McLaren’s second report (published in December 2016) is quoted by Schmid: “An institutional conspiracy existed across summer and winter sports athletes who participated with Russian officials within the Ministry of Sport and its infrastructure … along with the FSB for the purpose of manipulating doping controls”. [3]

Vitaly Mutko, former Minister of Sport in the Russian Federation, elevated to Deputy Prime Minister in October 2016, claimed in a letter of 9 October 2017 that a “State-doping support system has never ever existed in the Russian Federation”; [4] he blamed doping cases upon rogue individuals or officials working in sports organisations and connected to each other, and added that all such individuals had now been dismissed from their positions and become witnesses or suspects in an ongoing criminal investigation. He reiterated this claim to Schmid himself in a meeting on 17 November 2017, and followed this up with correspondence stating that Russian State Policy has consistently opposed doping, and that no Russian authorities have ever been involved in covering up doping cases.

The Schmid Report finds no direct evidence of Mutko’s involvement in the doping system, but has damned him nevertheless: “As leading the Ministry of Sport, the then Russian Minister had the ultimate administrative responsibility for the acts perpetrated at the time within the Russian Ministry or the entities under its responsibility”. [5] He is further criticised for the failure of the appropriate “responsible” Russian organisations to respect the WADA Code and the IOC’s Anti-Doping Rules at Sochi 2104. In its conclusion the report confirms that “the then Minister of Sport has to bear the major part of the administrative responsibility” [6] for the doping abuses. It was left to the Executive Board of the IOC to arrive at a key decision: “To exclude the then Minister of Sport, Mr Vitaly Mutko, and his then Deputy Minister, Mr Yuri Nagornykh, from any participation in all future Olympic Games”. [7]

Mutko has done the dirty work for Putin for years, as close observation and scrutiny has for some time observed. It is to the credit of the IOC Disciplinary Committee and its Executive Board that it has, in the case of endemic Russian corruption in doping, met rather than reneged upon its own responsibilities. Mutko may be further implicated in other spheres, such as Russia’s gaining of the FIFA World Cup event 2018, and the IOC decision could become a marker for those at FIFA willing to also face the responsibility of their positions and privileges. Mutko’s international disgrace is testimony to the potential of an emboldened and effective ethics process to clear out corruption from sport governance and practice. In almost any other political context, too, a deputy prime minister would within days have relinquished, or been dismissed from, office. Not, it seems, in Putin’s model of governance. Although Mutko has stated that he would step down from his positions as deputy prime minister and head of the 2018 FIFA World Cup “if it will be for the best” he has continued to cling to office and protest his innocence. Nevertheless, it may be that in future years the Schmid report will be seen as a turning point demonstrating that transformation and reform of international sport organisations such as the IOC and FIFA can indeed be accomplished by those who are not silenced by fear and coercion, and choose to act, speak and decide on the basis of balanced evidence and principled ideals.

Alan Tomlinson   12 December 2017

 

[1] IOC Disciplinary Commission’s Report to the IOC Executive Board, Lausanne, 2 December 2017.

[2] Ibid., 5/30.

[3] Ibid., 12/30.

[4] Ibid., 22/30.

[5] Ibid., 26/30.

[6] Ibid., 28/30.

[7] IOC Press Release, https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-suspends-russian-noc-and-creates-a-path-for-clean-individual-athletes-to-compete-in-pyeongchang-2018-under-the-olympic-flag, 5 December 2017.

Reflections on the corrupt leadership in the Russian Federation’s sports hierarchy: more on Mutko

Reflections on the corrupt leadership in the Russian Federation’s sports hierarchy: more on Mutko

Alan Tomlinson

The McLaren Reports showed, in July and November 2016, involvement at the highest levels of the Russian Federation (across government, the Russian Federal Security Service [FSB], and the national sport organisations) in the corrupt doping practices that stained the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014: the substitution of positive urine samples of athletes; state agents planted in or around dope-testing laboratories; and holes drilled in walls for the clandestine transfer of tampered-with bottles. These practices were also in place in part when Russia’s teams competed at the London 2012 Summer Olympics. The IOC decision to ban Russia from the forthcoming Winter Olympics, taken on Tuesday December 5th 2017 was vital to the credibility of the IOC. Anyone with the time to read through McLaren’s reports could see that the Russian Federation’s DPM (Disappearing Positive Methodology) system was a tragi-comic betrayal of the more idealistic claims of sport, and this was plain to see for those who looked closely enough way before the IOC’s own commissioned report on the situation. Vitaly Mutko, head of the Russian-hosted FIFA World Cup in June-July 2018, ducking and weaving in Russia itself and the corridors of international sports organisations, has long been exposed as a henchman of a ruthless President Putin. The IOC decision to ban his federation/nation from the Pyeongchang Games, and to ban Mutko himself for life, including from any contact with the Winter Olympics, may see him lose favour with the Russian president. Here I offer vignettes of Mutko and his amoral machinations. The question surely, in being reminded of Mutko’s history of unethical conduct and amoral malpractices, is why neither the IOC nor FIFA moved earlier to put an end to his corrupt power-broking and deal-making.       

 

Excerpts below from: Lincoln Allison and Alan Tomlinson, Understanding International Sport Organisations: Principles, Power and Possibilities (London and New York, Routledge, 2017)

(based on pp. 137-38) On the publication of the McLaren report, Russian President Putin commented that it represented ‘a dangerous slide towards political interference in sport’, stemming as it did from a single and dubious source, ‘one man with a scandalous reputation’ added Putin, master of doublespeak from his earlier career in the Soviet Union’s secret intelligence organisation, the KGB. But for Canadian lawyer McLaren, the biggest ‘surprise result’ of the inquiry was the level and scale of state involvement in the process: ‘the revelation of the extent of State oversight and directed control of the Moscow Laboratory in processing, and covering up urine samples of Russian athletes from virtually all sports before and after the Sochi Games’. McLaren claims that his investigation shows in unprecedented depth ‘proof of State directed oversight and corruption of the entirety of the Moscow laboratory’s analytical work’. Russia’s Ministry of Sport, its Federal Security Service and its so-called Anti-Doping Agency worked closely in clandestine and corrupt fashion to subvert WADA’s work and manufacture its Sochi success. One FSB operative was on the spot throughout the Sochi Games, with security clearance to enter the laboratory ‘under the guise of being a security engineer employed by engineering company Bilfinger’. Dr Rodkenchov had a double identity/role: director of the Moscow Laboratory and also FSB agent, code-name KUTS, responsible to his FSB superior who in turn would report to an FSB general. Vitaly Mutko, Minister of Sport, was also involved in the scheme: ‘it is inconceivable that Minister Mutko was not aware of the doping cover up scheme’, as Rodchenkov discussed the DPM (Disappearing Positive Methodology) plan with Mutko in meetings before the Sochi Games.

(based on pp. 181-82) In July 2016 Minister Mutko, as McLaren called him, was damned in the WADA-commissioned report on Russia’s state-run doping programme: Mutko’s ministry effectively ran the doping cover-ups in Russia’s disgraced anti-doping laboratories, as graphically outlined in McLaren’s reports. Mutko also personally ordered the doctoring of a foreign footballer’s urine sample, making the decision to cover up this player’s use of banned substances. His reward from Putin, in October 2016, was promotion to the newly-created position of Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.

(based on p.227) Vitaly Mutko was rewarded in October 2016 for his commitment and loyalty to Putin with elevation to the newly created post of deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation. Mutko’s brief in the new role was to embrace and oversee policies for sport, tourism and youth, little different to his task at his old ministry. It was in effect a way of moving him out of the immediate doping spotlight and of shifting responsibilities for responding to the doping issues to his successor, former Olympic fencer and erstwhile member of WADA’s foundation board and also Mutko’s deputy at the sports ministry, Pavel Kolobkov; and to veteran Soviet/Russian sports administrator Vitaly Smirnov. Smirnov would claim in November 2016 that ‘Russia has never had a state-doping system’, whilst offering a definition of ‘government’ as comprising full ministers and not deputy ministers, implying therefore that some of the latter may have been implicated in doping cover-ups.

 

Excerpt below from forthcoming Chapter 9, Alan Tomlinson’s “FIFA: Ethics, voice and organisational power plays”, in T.F Carter, Daniel Burdsey and Mark Doidge (eds), Transforming Sport (London and New York, Routledge, 2018)    

(based on p.131) One can only conclude that for several years no-one had been concerned – or courageous – enough within FIFA to question Mutko’s position, to alert the Ethics Committee and its Chambers to the need to interrogate Mutko’s strikingly obvious conflicts of interest in the conduct of his FIFA responsibilities. Fear was the order of the day, not integrity. Changes in the personnel at the head of FIFA’s ethics processes did lead to further scrutiny of Mutko in March 2017, and this adjudged him to be ineligible for re-election onto the main FIFA committee, now the FIFA Council, due to a conflict of interests stemming from his political status. Mutko merely shrugged his shoulders: ‘I wanted to get re-elected but FIFA has changed its criteria. A new criterion has been introduced: political neutrality’. FIFA had of course done nothing of the sort; the criterion was always prominent and unambiguous. In March 2017 though it looked as if FIFA’s decision-makers may be less timid than in corrupt president Sepp Blatter’s prime. But this was not worrying Mutko; by now no-one was going to take World Cup 2018 away from Russia, he was elevated to Deputy Prime Minister and able to muse that everything that Putin had wanted from him had been delivered. In December by the end of that year, though, the IOC was to condemn Mutko in the strongest terms.

 

So what’s next for the serially unethical Mutko, after the IOC decision? Outside of the Russian Federation, more witnesses were appearing to reaffirm all that had been revealed in the McLaren Reports. And more sources looked to be asking questions about the precise nature of Russia’s lobbying in the run-in to the December 2010 vote that awarded the country the FIFA (men’s) World Cup Finals for 2018. Mutko was one of those who voted on that decision, never declaring any possible conflict of interests, and has included the head of the 2018 World Cup operation among his continuing sporting duties. He may have, at least so far, survived and even strengthened his position and status in his home country, despite the IOC ban that he could claim to be a discretionary act against his country. But FIFA, constantly claiming under the presidency of Gianni Infantino to be reformed or reformable, must take the time to revisit and further examine the career and portfolio of Vitaly Mutko, in Russian football, FIFA decision-making and World Cup administration. He could become a record-breaker in the annals of sport corruption: the only person to be simultaneously serving life-bans from both FIFA and the IOC.

Alan Tomlinson                                                      6^th December 2017

Castro and Cuban Sport

Fidel Castro, Godfather of Sport

When Cuba, as a colonial outpost of Spain, sent its athletes to the first Olympic Games to be held in the Americas, in St. Louis in the USA in 1904, the small country bagged more than its fair share of medals, 9 in total, the bulk of these of for fencing. One can picture the fencing schools and academies of the elite that fostered this aristocratic skill and stimulated Cuba’s further emergence, after one gold at Paris 1900, onto the international sporting stage; and incredibly, the 9 medals were sufficient to place Cuba in third place in overall rankings of nations. At Rio de Janeiro in 2016 Cuban athletes won 11 medals in total, and its 5 golds comprised 3 in boxing and 2 in wrestling; it was placed eighteenth in overall national rankings. In the history of the Summer Olympics the sports in which Cuban athletes have won most of its medals are boxing, athletics, wrestling, judo, fencing, baseball, volleyball, weightlifting, taekwondo, shooting and canoeing. But this is not a narrative of consistent and comparable levels of sporting achievement by Cuban sportsmen and women. For in between St Louis and Rio, in the mid-twentieth century, sport was a core element of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary strategy. A baseball fanatic himself, he and his political colleagues saw sport as a means of enhancing the everyday lives of the Cuban population, and raising the image and profile of the country through the achievements of the “new” men and women who were children of the Cuban revolution.

Castro was a remarkable orator and a brilliant self-publicist. When the USA began embargos of Cuba after the 1959 revolution, Castro arranged to be photographed playing golf with Che Guevara (or, at least, making contact with a ball on a putting green as a crouching Che followed the action). This was a mickey-taking moment staged to embarrass the USA’s President Dwight Eisenhower, who had reputedly kept Castro himself waiting before an encounter whilst finishing a golf session; Castro criticised and then banned golf as a “bourgeois” sport. He got himself photographed playing table tennis, the sport at the heart of the ping-pong diplomacy between Richard Nixon’s USA and the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. When the FIFA-baiting bad boy of world football, Diego Maradona, looked for an off-centre ally it was to Cuba that he turned, photographed with Fidel Castro, and we are asked to believe that just a few years before his death Fidel himself wrote to his “old friend” Maradona assuring him that he was still alive. So sport was in effect for Castro a form of political message-making, a vital tool in the symbolic armoury of his country’s Cold War politics. But it was also much more than that, as the sport development strategy developed in the 1960s was directed inwards to the benefit of the overall population.

In 1961, two years after the Cuban revolution, Castro’s government created the National Institute for Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER). This was the same year in which the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco ended in a humiliating defeat and retreat of the aggressors. In the following years, sport was to feature prominently in the Cuban political project to improve the lives of Cuban people through education, health and medical care, and sport, physical activity and recreation. The policy adopted for sport and physical activity was called “massivity”, meaning the engagement of the masses, of all of the people, in beneficial forms of exercise, which would also generate a talent-spotting process leading to the selection of sportsmen and women with particular potential, and their possible inclusion in special support and development programmes. Cuban coaches, supported by exchanges and alliances with the Soviet Union, would be on constant alert for athletic potential. The great middle-distance runner Alberto Juantorena started out as a basketball player, attending state basketball school. But a Polish coach observed his phenomenally effective long-striding running style and Juantorena was switched to the athletic programme; in 1976 at Montreal he became the only male athlete to win both the 400 and 800 metre titles at an Olympic Games, and has since held the highest positions in his country’s sport administration. His contemporary, the boxer Teofilio Stevenson, won 3 Olympic boxing golds, in Munich, Montreal and Moscow and when asked why he had never looked to leave Cuba to fight Mohammed Ali, to become rich beyond the Cuban imagination, replied with the rhetorical question “what is a million dollars against 8 million people who love me?”. Cuba was exciting and astonishing the world, its women volleyballers chasing the medals at Summer Olympics up to 1980, its boxers accumulating titles almost by habit, and its track-and-field athletes sustaining levels of world-class performance.

Whilst the population was encouraged and supported to engage in sport and physical exercise for both fitness and fun, so complementing the top-class medical care available to post-revolution citizens, its internationally competitive athletes made Cuba and INDER the wonder of the sporting world. At Moscow in 1980, when the USA and many other countries boycotted the Games, Cuba shot up the medal rankings, finishing fourth in the rankings after the Soviet Union, East Germany and Bulgaria; Britain was in fifth place. Cuba boycotted Los Angeles ’84, following the Soviet Union’s tit-for-tat line in response to the US-led boycott of Moscow’s Games, though the Cuban rationale cited security issues as the primary concern underpinning the decision; and Seoul in 1988 (in solidarity with North Korea). Cuba then re-emerged at Barcelona ’92 to finish fifth in the overall rankings, one of its gold medals won by the superb women’s volleyball team that defeated the “Unified Team” (drawn from the old Soviet Union and some of the reconstituted states of its fragmented empire) to take its first Olympic gold. Barcelona was really the apex of the Cuban sporting miracle, when a second generation of children of the revolution came out of the shadows after a twelve-year absence from the Olympic stage, to suggest that the INDER programme was as strong as ever. But political worlds were shifting, and Fidel Castro’s sporting policies could not hold their own for much longer.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the thawing of the Cold War, and a stronger current within the sporting world opposing use of drugs and performing-enhancing substances, the Cuban profile on the Olympic podium was in decline. Still in the top ten in the rankings at Atlanta (8th) and Sydney (9th), Athens 2004 saw Cuba slip to 11th, and a nadir in Beijing at 28th. Respectable positions in the medal table at London (16th) and at Rio in 2016 (18th) were retrieved, based in the sustained strength of its boxers and wrestlers. More top baseball players had also left Cuba for the MLS and the lure of the American Dream; around four dozen of these plied their trade in the US at the time of Castro’s death. But the historical record and the sporting archives, as well as the educational and medical transformation of a neglected, deeply divided and unequal society, will be testimony to the positive dimensions of Fidel Castro’s Cuba: physical culture, learning and healthcare integrated into an effective formula that could shape the consciousness of a country for generations. Of course Castro was a dictator, a demagogue, a tyrannical anti-democrat. But his common touch and populist strategies combined idealism and political pragmatism in widely influential ways; and no more so than in the world of sport both within his country and across the globe. A “cruel dictator”, President-elect Trump labelled him, hearing of his death, and with some justification; but Fidel Castro’s Cuba may in the long run be a more compelling fable of political experimentation than the uninformed, ignorant and incoherent triumph of Donald Trump. And at the heart of that experiment was sport, developed and supported for both the benefit and health of the people, and the image of the nation.

Alan Tomlinson November 26th 2016