The hero who told it straight

I sat and watched and wondered if this wasn’t a metaphor for what professional sport sometimes seems. I mean some of those bubbles were so big you wondered what they were on. And then there were the dreams of the kids, chasing what they saw as wondrous only for it to burst when they got too close. You don’t need anyone to mention the athletes or their sports.

When you’ve been doing this job for more than 30 years, people assume you know more than you do. I’m thinking of a question that has become increasingly hard to answer. Who is your sporting hero? It seems almost cruel, arrogant even, to reply that there isn’t one. Instead you find a diplomatic route to an answer that isn’t a lie.

You can admire athletes for their skill, their courage, their dedication, the way they conduct themselves on and off the pitch. But those aren’t qualities that qualify as heroic. And it is a fundamental truth that professional sport, while offering athletes the chance to become better at what they do, pays scant attention to the personal development of its protagonists. The best pros are often the ones with the narrowest focus and an innate inclination towards selfishness. So I like them without loving them, giving them respect but not hero worship.

And if you pressed for some kind of sporting hero, the only name I’ve been able to come up with through the last 20 years was Sandro Donati, the Italian athletics coach and anti-doping campaigner. I heard him speak at a conference in Copenhagen 15 years ago and the memory has never dimmed. He told a story about being national coach to Italy’s middle-distance runners in the 1980s and his shock at discovering that his country’s athletics federation had decided to blood dope its athletes.

Working with the Italian athletics authorities, Professor Francesco Conconi was the mastermind behind the programme and as blood-doping wasn’t banned at the time, no one could see any problem.

Except Donati. He thought it was plain wrong. And dangerous. He advised his athletes to have no part is this cheating and against the wishes of their own federation, they refused to work with Conconi. Donati’s opposition to the use of blood transfusions made him unpopular in the corridors of sporting power and his career as a national coach suffered.

What I loved about Donati’s story was his refusal to be cowed by people in high places. He exposed the cheating by his compatriots at the 1987 world championships that initially gave a bronze medal to Giovanni Evangelisti in the long jump. Evangelisti’s medal was eventually handed over to the American Larry Myricks.

Donati knew corruption was rampant and that sport’s custodians were not doing their job. In the mid-90s he became aware of the abuse of erythropoietin in cycling and knew abuse of the drug had caused many cyclists to die in their sleep. He set out to force the authorities to do something about it. Off his own bat, he won the trust of a large group of Italian professional riders who told him how widespread EPO abuse had become. He wrote The EPO Dossier, a comprehensive report that showed the full extent of the problem facing professional cycling. The authorities allowed his report to lie on a shelf for two years and when he eventually made it public, through L’Equipe newspaper, cycling’s authorities said the problem wasn’t EPO but journalists always writing about doping.

Around this time, Donati realised he was wasting his time with sport’s administrators. They didn’t want to know. Italian police were far more interested and Donati helped them in their various inquiries into doping. They achieved far more in the fight against doping than the Italian sports authorities ever had.

I remember the Saturday night in February, 2004, that Marco Pantani was found dead in that hotel room in Rimini and how upset and angry Donati was. Pantani had used performance-enhancing drugs, recreational drugs and other proscribed medicines and his death was directly related to these abuses.

“They’re showing footage of Pantani winning those mountain races on the television tonight,” said Donati, “when they know he was using these drugs. It is like watching pornography.” Donati spent a lot of time figuring out how to get ethical messages about sport into Italian primary schools. He has always been my hero.

He wrote last week, I give you the gist of what he said: “I am now strongly committed to a particular challenge, perhaps the last of my life, through which I hope to make a strong blow against doping. I’m training Alex Schwazer, Olympic champion of the 50km walk in Beijing but a customer since 2010 of Michele Ferrari and in 2012, before the London Games, positive for EPO. He was banned for three years and nine months. He has come to me for my training methodology and has asked me to act as guarantor of his credibility after he returns to racing. I know every detail of his story because I helped the prosecutor in the case against him. Since last March, Alex has had 18 blood tests even though I am absolutely certain he will never again resort to doping.

“I hope to bring him to Rio to win medals in 20km and 50km walks. And if I can I will have defeated doping, at least once.”

Donati is 68 now and for all of his adult life this has been his fight.

World Cup review needs calm heads

THERE is nothing like talk of a review to draw people from the woodwork, each wanting their voice to be heard. So when the RFU’s chief executive, Ian Ritchie, sets out to find out how it all went so horribly wrong at the World Cup, he would not have been short of people ready to offer their tuppence-worth.

Ritchie could probably write another report, four or five times longer than the official review, about the canvassers and those eager to get in his ear.

Perhaps the most interesting contributions have come from the owners of England’s Premiership clubs, who believe their collective voice should be heard. The argument runs that as the clubs pay the bulk of the players’ salary, the owners and the coaches should have a say in how the players are used and coached.

Various club coaches offered their views on Stuart Lancaster’s selection of his squad and starting team and, mostly, they spoke out of self-interest. So Northampton weren’t happy with how Luther Burrell was treated, Exeter thought England hadn’t made the best use of Henry Slade, and on it went.

But the most striking observation came from Bath owner Bruce Craig, who thought the clubs should have a say on who should be England’s next coach.

Anyone who has visited Bath’s training centre at Farleigh House gets a sense of how much Craig cares about the club and, more importantly, how much he is prepared to invest. Sometimes, though, he can lose touch with reality. Why should England’s club owners have any input into who coaches the national team? Mike Ford, Bath’s head coach, has already said he’s not interested in leaving the club but what if he was. Wouldn’t Craig’s first loyalty be to his club, and would that not create a conflict of interest in relation to who should coach the national team?

Owning a major club makes Craig a powerful player in English rugby. It would be good if he knew where that power ended.

Rodgers' relief

IT'S hard not to feel some sympathy for Brendan Rodgers as the fanfares herald the arrival of Jurgen Klopp at Anfield. In the excitement generated by the German’s appointment, it’s almost as if Rodgers never existed, as if Liverpool now have a real manager and one who will take them places. The things they now say about Klopp were once said about Rodgers.

That was when the former manager had Luis Suarez playing like a Demigod, scoring and creating goals, inspiring those around him. That was the time of Brendan Rodgers, the most innovative young manager in the Premier League. Then Suarez goes to Barcelona and Rodgers’ career begins the long journey south.

For some time before he was sacked, Rodgers was a dead-manager-walking and perhaps when the shock has receded he will feel some relief that it’s over. There is talk that he would like to start again with a La Liga club. That wouldn’t be such a bad option.