SOCHI, Russia (AP) - Germany football coach Joachim Loew wants more clarity from sports leaders following speculation that doping of Russia’s 2014 World Cup squad was covered up.
The World Cup-winning coach urged the World Anti-Doping Agency and FIFA to be transparent and identify players implicated.
“If there really are names there, they shouldn’t be hidden at all,” Loew said Wednesday at a news conference in Sochi, where his team plays a Confederations Cup semifinal.
“I can’t prove it and no one apparently can if we are not having the facts here on the table,” Loew said through a translator. “And if players have been doped, well, they have to be removed, they have to be suspended.”
Loew was asked by German broadcaster ARD about the World Cup claim and other new allegations that state-backed Russian doping went deeper into football than was previously suspected.
Earlier Wednesday, the broadcaster released an interview with WADA investigator Richard McLaren who said FIFA is aware of 155 potentially suspect samples given by football players in Russia that await analysis.
McLaren told ARD he suspected Russian authorities kept a bank of clean urine samples from footballers to replace tainted ones - a similar system to evade positive doping tests as was used at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
FIFA declined to comment Wednesday on ARD’s report.
The Canadian lawyer’s sprawling investigation of the Olympic doping conspiracy implicated more than 1,000 athletes across many sports. It included evidence in emails and documents of at least 35 football cases for FIFA to prosecute.
The evidence had few details, though included a June 2014 document apparently linked to the squad Russia sent to the World Cup in Brazil. FIFA acknowledged being aware of the document this week after a report by a British Sunday newspaper.
FIFA has not formally identified any players under suspicion, nor imposed provisional suspensions.
“We have the report from WADA but we are not supposed to be disclosing any names,” FIFA secretary general Fatma Samoura said Wednesday, in Kazan for the Portugal vs. Chile semifinal. “Until we got the final decision from the laboratory we cannot elaborate.”
Football leaders in the 2018 World Cup host nation consistently dismiss suggestions of a problem.
“There hasn’t been a single doping incident in Russian football in many recent years,” Alexei Sorokin, CEO of the World Cup organizing committee, said this week of the British report. “We do not regard this as any serious matter.”
Germany’s Loew was speaking in the Sochi stadium which hosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the much-criticized Winter Games.
He urged WADA and FIFA to “just call a spade a spade, and then we know what is going to happen from there.”
___
AP Sports Writer Tales Azzoni in Kazan, Russia, contributed to this report
Please read our comment policy before commenting.