Maximum ballyhoo about the Russians’ apparent inability to take the rules of amateur sport seriously. I’m listening right now to the schoolmarmish BBC, clucking and tutting.
I call this whole thing bullshit, part of the Obama/European attempts to start Cold War II and keep their defense industries solvent.
Of course all the Olympic athletes cheat. Those from countries with governments (like Russia) cheat because the government tells them to, for the sake of the glory of the nation, while those from countries with corporations (like the USA) cheat because, if they can only win, their sports clothing endorsement deals are going to be worth more, or perhaps because people from countries with serious betting have made then an even more irresistible offer.
The only people in the world who seem genuinely to care about preserving the basic decency of amateur sport are of course the poor deluded English, who took more than 40 years to work out that they were also the only people to take seriously the millions of arbitrary ‘directives’ of the European Union.
