NO HOLDS BARRED

We spoke with him by phone Friday.

It is well-known that there is widespread cheating and corruption in world sport, including state-sponsored doping. But corruption in world sport is so deep-rooted that state-sponsored organizations and media sites are popping up that claim to be anti-corruption, but which actually promote the corrupt activities of their sponsors.

"Follow the money," advised Declan Hill.

"This has been going on for almost a decade now. And it's linked, listeners, to two of the greatest geopolitical scandals in sports. And when I say geopolitical, I'm not exaggerating. This is like John le Carré, those international spy thrillers, meets 'Chariots of Fire'. This is big-time, major politics, and it's about the survival of states," he said.

"We're moving beyond sports corruption. We're moving beyond match-fixing. We're moving beyond doping," he noted.

"The two classic actors, the ones that are head and shoulders above everyone else, are of course the Russians, and the Qatar people. And they are into sports for two diametrically different reasons, but it is both conditional on the existential strength of their current governing regimes."

We discussed the reasons Russia and Qatar are among the world champions of sports corruption today, with the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups as prime examples, and how they each are spreading propaganda to obscure this.

For real exposures and reporting on sports corruption, he said that the "gold standard" is Play the Game, with its biennial international conferences and web site packed with informative analysis.

We discussed some of the dirty details of how sports corruption and spying on journalists are carried out; how a giveaway that something is not genuine anti-corruption analysis is if it puts the main blame on individual athletes rather than countries' sports systems for doping; how Qatar has used a system of "modern-day slavery"; how the spread of legal sports gambling is making many sports like horse racing, where people watch not for entertainment or to see who wins but mainly for betting purposes; the continued "sports-washing" of tyrannical regimes which overspend to attract major sporting events; the challenges facing honest journalists as much of the media and in particular sports media are in decline; the importance of organizations like Human Rights Watch in fighting sports corruption; and much, much more.

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