Dojokvic Winner over Murray in Madrid

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Novak Djokovic beat defending champion Andy Murray 6-2 3-6 6-3 in the Madrid Open final. The defeat means the 28-year-old Briton will lose his world number two ranking to Roger Federer on Monday.

The Scot was blown away in the opening set, but fought back to level, only to fall to the Serb's power and accuracy in the decider.

Djokovic now moves ahead of Spain's Rafael Nadal with a record 29 ATP Masters 1000 titles.

The Serb underlined his current dominance as he claimed his fifth title in the past six Masters tournaments but he was pushed hard by Murray, exemplified by a 14-minute final game as Djokovic survived six deuces and seven break points to hold for the match.

"The first couple of break points I remember making two mistakes," said Murray.

"It was kind of back and forth from there and unfortunately I couldn't quite break, which was a shame because both of us on the break points until that last game were pretty clinical."

Djokovic broke Murray's serve in the opening game and the 2011 winner gave a masterclass combining powerful ground shots with brutal accuracy as he found the lines with uncanny regularity.

Murray found his second serve coming under huge pressure and Djokovic duly earned a double break before racing to the first set in just 31 minutes.

In the second, however, the Scot's serve began to click into gear and, having won just 17% of points on his second serve in the first set, he increased it to an impressive 60% in the second.

Djokovic made crucial forehand and backhand errors in the third game before serving a double-fault to be broken for only the second time in the tournament.

The Madrid crowd who were muted as Murray beat local favourite Rafael Nadal 7-5 6-4 in Saturday's semi-finals were now encouraging the Briton, who responded with some of his best tennis of the week as he won the set with a cheeky drop shot from the back of the court.

It was Djokovic's turn to regroup and after a comfortable hold needed just one of two break points to take the early initiative in the decider.

But this was a different Murray from the opening set and the Scot immediately broke back with Djokovic again serving a double fault at the crucial moment.

Again, however, the world number one raised the bar and this time it proved crucial with a decisive break in the sixth game.

"When you play against the best players, you are probably not going to win every single time," said Murray. "But you want to make the matches extremely difficult for them: physically and mentally, so it's not comfortable. So I think at least today I did that, but unfortunately didn't get the win.

"It's been a positive week for me this week overal l- a few years ago I wouldn't have thought I'd be winning against Rafa and then pushing Novak this close on a clay court."

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Murray Makes Mutua Madrid Quarters

Murray in Madrid

 Defending champion Andy Murray reached the quarter-finals of the Madrid Open with an impressive 6-4 6-2 win over 16th seed Gilles Simon of France.

Second seed Murray, 28, broke Simon for the first time to take the opening set as part of a five-game winning run.

He then broke three times in the second set to complete victory in one hour, 38 minutes.

Murray will play either Czech Tomas Berdych or Spaniard David Ferrer in the last eight.

Murray's serve was never broken and the power and variety of his ground strokes was too much for Simon, 31.

"It's always difficult to get the balance right against him because the better you hit the ball, the faster it comes back against him," Murray said.

"He uses the pace very well so I knew I needed to be patient and use variety, but also when the chance is there, go for it. Sometimes he makes players rush, but today I didn't have that problem. It was good from start to finish."

World number one Novak Djokovic, who won in Madrid in 2011, plays Spain's Roberto Bautista Agut later on Thursday.

Four-time winner Rafael Nadal, who lost to Murray is last year's final, plays Sam Querrey of the United States in the evening session.

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Sharapova Still Faces Hearing

Maria Sharapova

Maria Sharapova will face a hearing for testing positive for meldonium, despite the World Anti-Doping Agency issuing fresh guidance on the banned substance.

Wada said on Tuesday athletes who tested positive for meldonium before 1 March could avoid bans.

But the International Tennis Federation said Sharapova's case will proceed.

The Russian tested positive for the drug at this year's Australian Open, after it was added to Wada's banned substances list from 1 January.

Wada's change in stance is due to a "lack of clear scientific information on excretion times", meaning the agency has so far been unable to establish how long it takes for the drug to clear the human body.

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IAAF Scandal Worse than FIFA - Johnson

Reuters

The corruption scandal plaguing athletics is worse than the one faced by football, says four-time Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson.

Three senior IAAF officials were banned for life for alleged doping breaches.

And Russia is currently banned from all athletics competitions following accusations of widespread doping.

Asked how the scandal facing athletics compared to that of Fifa, Johnson told the BBC: "If you think about the victims, it is absolutely worse."

Fifa, the body that governs world football, is also in crisis following a series of damaging corruption claims.

Its president, Sepp Blatter, has been banned for eight years for breaching ethics rules.

In an interview with Mishal Husain, Johnson said that those athletes cheated out of medals by dopers "never had the opportunity to stand on the podium - and they should have".

However, he stopped short of backing an Olympic ban for Russian athletes later this year.

"Do you ban an entire country that ostensibly could include clean athletes, from participating in Rio?" asked the American, who still holds the world and Olympic records for the 400m.

"That is a very difficult decision to make."

Johnson was also cool on the idea, floated by chairman of UK Athletics Ed Warner, of resetting all world records so athletics could start afresh with a level playing field.

"It doesn't make sense to me how a reset of all the world records is going to deal with the issue of people cheating," Johnson said.

"It doesn't create a clean competition and that does not deter anyone from cheating."

But he does believe the International Association of Athletics Federations must be "completely restructured".

"It is the governing body - and the very structure of the governing body - that has allowed this type of corruption," he said.

A report by the World Anti-Doping Agency's independent commission was scathing of former IAAF president Lamine Diack, whose 16-year reign came to an end in August 2015 when he was replaced by Lord Coe.

It claimed that "corruption was embedded" in the organisation and said it could not be ignored or dismissed as attributable to "the odd renegade acting on his own".

It concluded: "The IAAF allowed the conduct to occur and must accept its responsibility."

Johnson said he hoped the crisis would be the catalyst for "a fresh look" at all the problems facing athletics and would help rebuild trust with fans.

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Records Reset Pointless - Bolt

Six-times Olympic champion Usain Bolt says he feels shocked and let down by the scandal-hit IAAF. But the Jamaican sprinter is against resetting athletics world records as the sport attempts to move on from the doping crisis.

Thursday’s second instalment of a World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report criticised the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), accusing its former head, Lamine Diack, of running a clique that covered up organised doping and blackmailed athletes as senior officials looked the other way. The first part of the report by independent investigator Dick Pound, a former head of Wada, in November led to athletics superpower Russia being banned from competition for state-sponsored doping.

Jamaican sprint king Bolt, the biggest name in athletics with a plethora of titles, records and commercial deals, said the IAAF had failed their athletes. “When I heard it was quite shocking for me to hear that because as far as I was concerned I think they were doing a good job to clean up the sport,” Bolt told Reuters in Kingston after collecting his sixth National Sportsman of the year award. “So for me to hear something like this was quite shocking and you feel let down as an athlete to be wanting to actually help clean up the sport, and then something like this to come up about the body. It’s kind of a letdown, so hopefully there’s no such thing, but we’ll see what happens.”

Diack stepped down last year after 16 years leading the IAAF and was replaced by Sebastian Coe. The Senegalese is already under formal investigation in France on suspicion of corruption and money laundering linked to the concealment of positive drug tests in concert with Russian officials and the blackmailing of the athletes to allow them to continue to compete. The reports noted that Diack “sanctioned and appeared to have had personal knowledge of the fraud and the extortion of athletes carried out by the actions of the illegitimate governance structure he put in place”.

UK Athletics (UKA) released “A Manifesto for Clean Athletics” on Monday, calling for world records to be wiped clean and drug cheats to be banned for at least eight years in radical proposals aimed at heralding in a new era for the sport. The 29-year-old Bolt, who set the 100m and 200m world records of 9.58 and 19.19 seconds in 2009 and shared in the 4x100m mark of 36.84secs in 2012, is against the proposal.

“As far as I’m concerned it’s really pointless,” he said. “What’s done is done, you have to just move forward and try to make the upcoming championships and Olympics and the next [world] records as best as we can and just look forward to the future. You can’t worry about the past, but try to build on the future.”

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IAAF Curioser and Curioser for Coe

The second part of the Wada report into doping in Russia and attempted cover-ups at the IAAF will conclude that there was no way members of the world athletics governing body’s council, which included the current president Sebastian Coe, could have been unaware of the extent of doping and non-enforcement of the rules in track and field, according to the Associated Press.

AP says details of the 89-page investigation, to be released by the World Anti-Doping Agency on Thursday, were provided to the news agency early by a person who had reviewed it. The person did not want to be identified because the report had not been publicly released.

The report also says that the leader of track’s governing body, Lamine Diack, told a lawyer he would need to cut a deal with the Russian president Vladimir Putin to ensure nine Russian athletes accused of doping would not compete at the 2013 world championships in Moscow, according to AP.

The report, written by Wada’s first president, Dick Pound, says the International Association of Athletics Federations must restructure to ensure corruption cannot go unchecked. The corruption “cannot be blamed on a small number of miscreants”, Pound wrote.

“The corruption was embedded in the organisation,” the report says. “It cannot be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on his own.”

Coe was accused by a parliamentary committee of a “lack of curiosity” and failing to ask enough questions during his eight years as vice-president. Asked whether the IAAF was institutionally corrupt, Coe insisted it was not and said allegations had been made against only a “handful” of employees.

The Wada report comes a day after the AP released details from six years of IAAF internal emails, reports and notes showing a high level of communication between the athletics federation and Russian officials about suspicious test results from the nation’s athletes, including plans to cover up some doping evidence.

In addition to the deal-making friendship forged between Putin and then IAAF president Diack, the report details a sudden increase from $6m to $25m (£17.4m) for Russian rights to televise the 2013 worlds provided by a Russian bank, and also tells of a lawyer who was handpicked by Diack to handle Russian cases even though he had little experience with anti-doping measures.

Pound details meetings between Diack and IAAF lawyer Huw Roberts, who delivered details of the nine Russian doping cases directly to Diack and asked how he planned to resolve them.

With no resolution coming, Diack explained to Roberts “he was in a difficult position that could only be resolved by President Putin of Russia with whom he had struck up a friendship,” the report said.

Eventually, the report says, none of the nine athletes competed in Moscow, but their cases were not further pursued by the IAAF. Those delays led to Roberts’ resignation in January 2014. By then, according to the report’s details, Roberts had virtually no control over cases involving Russians.

A separate report, by the IAAF independent ethics commission this month, said that Roberts had threatened to resign three times over the issue of Russian athletes with suspect blood values not being sanctioned since he learned of the problem in late 2012. After repeatedly confronting Lamine Diack, Roberts tendered his resignation at the end of 2013 and eventually resigned in April 2014 before returning under Coe.

In November 2011, Diack turned over responsibility for Russian cases involving biological passport blood tests to his personal lawyer, Habib Cissé.

Cissé is under investigation in France for corruption. Diack’s son, Papa Massata Diack, has been banned from track for life. Papa Massata and another of Diack’s sons, Khalil, both had IAAF jobs outside the official framework of the federation that set them up to execute all the fraud, the report said.

The report details a 2012 meeting at a Moscow hotel involving a Russian TV adviser, Papa Massata Diack, Cissé and the Russian athletics federation head Valentin Balakhnichev, who was also honorary treasurer of the IAAF. The meeting was set to resolve a “problem” with the $6m price tag for the Russian TV rights to the following year’s world championships.

After the meeting, Papa Massata Diack had an arrangement with a leading Russian bank worth $25m.

Pound called for the IAAF to undertake forensic examination of how the TV rights were awarded to determine if there were any improprieties.

This was the second of two reports from Pound. His previous report, released in November, detailed corruption in Russia. Since then, the country’s track team has been suspended, along with its anti-doping agency and the Moscow anti-doping lab.

Together the report and other recent revelations indicate that many officials inside the IAAF, which announced the ban of Russian athletes in November, were aware of the growing Russian doping problem for years before taking action against the nation, and some may have been actively covering up Russian wrongdoing.

On the back of the ethics commission report, the IAAF banned Papa Massata Diack, Balakhnichev, and Alexei Melnikov, the former head coach of Russia’s race-walking and long-distance running programmes, for life.

Lamine Diack is on bail in France and the prosecutor said Papa Massata Diack, believed to be in Senegal, would be arrested if he set foot in France.

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Rio Unlikely for Russian Athletics

Russia are unlikely to return to international competition in time for next year's Rio Olympics, says European Athletics president Svein Arne Hansen.

Russia's athletics federation was banned by the International Association of Athletics Federations for alleged involvement in widespread doping.

An IAAF inspection committee is due to visit Russia in January.

"For the moment they have to fulfil the conditions, but I cannot really see them competing in Rio," Hansen said.

The committee is likely to report back to the IAAF Council at the earliest at its meeting in Cardiff, Wales, on 27 March, less than five months before the Olympics.

"They must have a cultural change," Hansen told Athletics Weekly magazine. "They must get rid of all those people from before.

"We know some good people in Russian athletics and I'm sure they will be elected. We hope that some new people will come in who really understand that this must be changed."

The IAAF voted to suspend Russia's federation (Araf) on 13 November after the publication of an independent World Anti-Doping Agency report that alleged "state-sponsored doping".

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Cookson Denies Verbruggen Claims

The president of cycling’s governing body has denied his predecessor Hein Verbruggen’s claims that they have reached an agreement to end legal proceedings which would have seen the Dutchman retain his role as honorary president of the UCI.

Verbruggen, who left his post as president in 2005, had threatened legal action against cycling’s governing body over what he described as an “outrageously biased, misleading and frequently wrong” investigation into the sport’s doping past.

The current president, Brian Cookson, has previously called for Verbruggen to step down but the Dutchman has told insidethegames.biz that they had reached an agreement which means: “Mr Cookson renounces definitively from asking me to resign from my honorary presidency and agrees not to mention this question any more publicly or privately.” According to insidethegames, the UCI also paid £29,000 towards Verbruggen’s legal costs.

However, Cookson has denied that is the case and stated that any agreement with Verbruggen was now void.

“I was elected to change the way the UCI conducts itself and therefore, following a request from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), I indeed met with Mr Hein Verbruggen last summer,” read a statement. “We came to a confidential agreement which was to ensure, amongst other things, that he would stop using his influence to criticise and cause trouble for the UCI. Since Mr Verbruggen never respected his commitments, the agreement is considered null. No money has ever been paid to Mr Verbruggen since I became President.”

A 227-page report into cycling’s doping culture said that the UCI colluded with Lance Armstrong to cover up positive tests at the 1999 Tour de France, when Verbruggen was in charge of the organisation.

Verbruggen, 73, said he started a court case against the UCI and Cookson, as well as lodging a complaint to the International Olympic Committee ethics commission which resulted in the IOC mediating between the parties with an agreement signed to end legal proceedings.

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