With the Russian doping scandal threatening to engulf the Rio Olympics, questions are being asked about the prospects for the 2018 football World Cup, which is due to kick off in less than two years.
The latest report from the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) gives a shocking insight Russia's state-sponsored doping programme, which was orchestrated by the ministry of sport under the leadership of Vitaly Mutko. It reveals how the scheme corrupted the Winter Olympics at Sochi in 2014 and the world athletics championships a year earlier.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has so far stopped short of banishing Russia from next month's Games, but it has withdrawn its patronage of any sporting event to be held in Russia, including the European Games in 2019, and ordered all Olympic winter sports to "freeze their preparations for major events in Russia, such as world championships and world cups, and to actively look for alternative organisers".
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The reaction from "an organisation that prefers to sail in sedate seas rather than rock the boat" is striking, says Sean Ingle of The Guardian. "Yet the football World Cup remains firmly in Russia’s clutches for 2018. The question, surely more than ever before, is why?"
With the nation's sporting administrators so tainted, Russia must be stripped of the honour of hosting the event, he says. "It would be ripping away the tournament from the very people and state authorities who have been shown to have cheated, corrupted, lied and obfuscated – and done everything in their powers to hide it. The 2018 World Cup would undoubtedly provide Russia with enormous prestige – a prestige it surely should now be denied."
If Fifa has changed its spots and really does now care about corruption and cheating in sport it must act, agrees Tony Evans in the London Evening Standard. "The exposure of the state-sponsored doping cover-up during the Sochi Winter Olympics and role of Vitaly Mutko, the sports minister, in systematically protecting Russian cheats makes it impossible to believe any global event could be trusted to the country."
At the centre of everything is Mutko. According to Russian whistleblowers, it is "inconceivable" that he knew nothing of the doping programme. Yet he is president of the Russian Football Union and chairman of the organising committee of the 2018 World Cup. He has also been a member of Fifa's council since 2009.
Against that backdrop, a World Cup in Russia would bring together the strands of everything that is wrong with sport, says Evans.
Not only are Russia and Mutko up to their necks in a doping scandal, there are serious question marks over the manner in which Russia won the right to host the tournament - an investigation into bribery allegations stalled when it was revealed that the Russian computers involved in the bid had been destroyed.
"Russian football is mired in corruption and chaos," says Evans. "Racism is rife in the stands and the ugly events in Marseille when Russia played England last month gave a snapshot of the politically charged organised hooliganism that surrounds the game in the country."
But Fifa now has an opportunity: "Since the fall of Sepp Blatter and the revelations about the extent of villainy at the top of the game, football’s ruling body’s reputation has been in tatters. Yet even the disgraced Blatter looks palatable by comparison with the Russian sports minister. Gianni Infantino, Fifa’s president... could restore some status to himself and the organisation by stripping Russia of the World Cup."
