MAY 11 – FOOTBALL has been warned again that it faces being dropped from the 2012 London Olympics unless it agrees to implement a worldwide code on doping that has been ratified by nearly every other major sport and Government.
Dick Pound, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, today claimed the International Olympic Committee would not back down from taking the ultimate sanction unless FIFA brought its rules into line with the other 27 Olympic sports.
“The code is not negotiable,” he said during a teleconference from Montreal on the eve of the WADA executive board meeting on Saturday. “FIFA has the free right if it wants to comply with the code. If the don’t fine, but there will be consequences with the IOC and Governments around the world.
“There are a whole bunch of very bad things that will happen. I am confident FIFA understands precisely what it has to do. The IOC will not decide something like that until they have to. But they haven’t changed the Olympic charter saying that only sports that adopt and apply the World Anti-Doping code can remain on the Olympic programme is pretty definitive.
“I do not see the IOC backing away from that, however important that sport is.”
Sport’s Court of Arbitration ruled in Switzerland last month that FIFA had not fully complied with the World Anti-Doping code, but there were no legal grounds to prevent FIFA from doing so.
It was Britain that asked for clarity. They wanted to know if they still had to conduct anti-doping tests on behalf of Fifa given that the soccer body did not fully endorse Wada’s rules.
The arbitration court ruled however that Fifa did not support WADA’s rules in six important areas.
In some cases Wada will suspend a competitor for two years, but FIFA, for example, is just prepared to suspend a player for six months.