It's time to take back our games

12 November 2015 - 02:09 By Tom Fordyce

Perhaps the only real surprise in the new Bond film, Spectre, is that the eponymous immoral organisation has not branched into sports administration. Sport matters because it has the potential to do what very little else in the world can: unite communities, stir the soul, strengthen the body, build bonds between disparate nations, and offer individuals identity and an escape. But sport is not getting the governance it deserves.Governance is a dull word. So is administration. It is critical, and it is critical that it is done right, because otherwise we are all being cheated.Sportspeople are being swindled of their careers, of their reputations, of their future. We sports lovers are being defrauded of our trust, our emotional energy and our financial largesse.Another day, another deluge of dirty laundry. On Monday, an independent commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency revealed a toxic epidemic of doping, cover-ups and extortion running across Russian athletics and spreading into the sport's international governing body.We should be surprised by the depth and reach of this latest scandal. But how can we be when it stems from a pattern so familiar across the sporting world?There is football governing body Fifa, with 14 of its current and former officials and associates on FBI charges of "rampant, systemic and deep-rooted" corruption.There was the International Cycling Union under former president Hein Verbruggen, found to have colluded with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong to cover up his positive dope test at the 1999 Tour de France.There is the International Cricket Council, run by N Srinivasan, who was banned from running his own national governing board by the Supreme Court of India.There is F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, who had his bribery trial in a German court settled in exchange for a £60-million payment, and he left court a free man with no stain on his character.And there was the IOC before the Winter Games at Salt Lake City, expelling six of its members for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from officials behind the city's bid in 2002.There might be the temptation to shrug with cynicism, to suggest that where such power and money flows there will always be irresistible temptation. Do not.With every scandal a little more faith leaches away. When you can't trust what you are watching, when you wonder where your money is going, then the leak becomes a flood.What to do? Some say keep caring. Others, be angry. Demand more. Elite sport happens because you watch, listen and read. Sponsors come calling because you come with it. That money is there because of you, so exert the control you have. Those who do not agree with the ICC cutting the number of teams in its one-day World Cup from 14 to 10, further eviscerating the smaller nations, can deluge it with complaint.If you watched Death of a Gentleman and were distressed to learn that India, Australia and England carve up more than half of all Test revenues between them, you could join the film's Change Cricket campaign.If the voting process that awarded Fifa's World Cup to a small desert state with a questionable human rights record disturbs you, boycott sponsors who bankroll it.There are those who turn off the Diamond League when dope cheats are welcomed back. Others stop buying the trainers of companies that give those cheats shoe contracts. The fan is not an impotent consumer.Sport survives only if we all keep coming back. We come back because we believe in it. If that trust goes, everything falls with it. It is a bottom line that brooks no argument. BBC Sport..

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