Sport is made for betting

Fair play to the IOC for being proactive and wanting to avoid any match-fixing scandals from ever tainting an Olympic Games. But it's a bit rich to single out betting as the evil one when over the years there have been numerous suspicious judging decisions in athletics, boxing and other sports to satisfy political agendas. Not to mention the old junkets and favours which used to be exchanged in order to succeed with a bid to host the Games. IOC sets up system to watch for illegal betting At last year's Beijing Games, the IOC used a system set up by FIFA for soccer to watch for irregular betting on Olympic competitions. The monitoring found that a wide array of bets were offered for all Olympic sports, but that bets laid were generally small — between $7 to $70, the IOC says. It says there were no cases of irregular betting. Firstly the title of the article is wrong - you can't 'monitor' illegal betting, the whole point of black market betting is that it's untrac...

So to all the Russian readers who sent me abuse for releasing the story before it was confirmed.... take your blinkers off and wake up to the real world. Russian newscentre VES believes that the testing in Lausanne has returned three positive B samples for a variety of EPO, initially believed to be CERA. The hall of shame: Albina Akhatova Ekaterina Iourieva Dmitry Yaroshenko The announcement from the International Biathlon Union is believed to be imminent. May they never grace a biathlon competition again. There is no place in professional sports for drug cheats. "We are facing systematic doping at the large scale in one of the strongest teams of the world," IBU President Anders Besseberg told reporters in the eastern resort town of Pyeongchang. "Either we have been able to catch them all, or we have only seen the top of the ice mountain," he said. "There is no, absolutely no, excuse for what the three doped Russian athletes and the people behind them have done...

Delusional, endemic or just plain corrupt? The Russian Federation's answer to the three positive tests in biathlon is "These drugs aren't on your banned list, so we can't be suspended". CERA is a new form of EPO, the biggest illegal drug in endurance sport which now has 10 varieties. This particular variety is not on the banned list yet, so the Russians have sent all their team to Korea for next week's World Championships, claiming they can't be banned. "Our scientists are better than your scientists!". This isn't a cough medicine or asthma medication, this is a drug developed purely to cheat. How many Russian athletes are going to end up dead before they turn 40 because their body has been systematically infested by man-made drugs? Virtually every women's world record in athletics has the massive tarnish of drugs cheat on it, certainly every record set more than 10 years ago, of which there are plenty. Why are none of these records remot...

Let's start by saying that no result is official, only the A-tests have come back positive and all athletes are entitled to have their B-sample analysed before being declared guilty. But it appears the Russians are in total denial that they are doing anything wrong. Swedish biathlete Matthias Nilsson Jr commented on his blog "why is anybody surprised? The rest of the team will just continue as usual" and was bombarded with threats such as 'We'll be waiting for you in Khanty Mansiysk' (Russian venue for Biathlon World Cup event next month, and 'I hope you die from cancer'. Charming chaps. Anything to justify serial cheating. The comments and abuse have been picked up by various Scandinavian media channels. I copped a bunch of anonymous comments in Russian which meant nothing to me, followed by some abuse in English as well. Hence comments are now moderated... Biathlon authorities are hopeful that the B-tests will be processed in time for the World Champ...