As FIFA reacts to the allegations of corruption that Lord Triesman has launched into its penalty area with the menace of a Rory Delap throw-in, it seems that football may be on the brink of the kind of self-censoring exercise in which the International Olympic Committee engaged in the wake of the damaging evidence of bribery that came out of the bid process for the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games.

The blue touch paper has been lit; and at least one other ominous trail looks likely to be ignited by the disillusioned World Cup bidders from Australia.

There is a cogent argument that whenever bad news surfaces in sport it is healthy. The very fact that we all hear about charges of corruption, or high profile doping offences, means that such disorders are being addressed. Sport is dealing with its sickness.

The sport of athletics, for instance, has long decried its negative image, maintaining that its increasing diligence in identifying and punishing doping offenders should be lauded, not least because that diligence is in marked contrast to the attitude prevalent in other high profile sports. Hello baseball. Oh, and hello football.

For athletics, the perception that "they're all at it" is maddening. They're not all at it. It's just that some are, and the sport is trying to eradicate them.

But whether you regard the current question mark over FIFA as a good thing or not, there is no disputing the fact that such issues are profoundly depressing. Even if it means something is being addressed, you'd rather it wasn't there to be addressed in the first place.

When people look back to May 2011, it may be that they will see it as a dark period for FIFA, and it may be they will see it as an encouraging period given that issues of probity and honesty were being brought out into the open.

But May 2011 will be remembered in a sporting context for reasons other than the raging debate over the governance of world football.

Ask Roberto Custodio. Ask Roger Deague.

When Custodio was 13, his father was murdered by the drug traffickers who ruled over the Rio de Janeiro favela in which he had been raised. For a while, he dedicated his life to earning revenge – that is, to tracking down and killing those responsible. Then sport happened.

The reason it happened was down to a Briton who had been a boxer before injury halted him, Luke Dowdney. In 2000 this student of anthropology set up a boxing club in the Rio favela of Mare – a place ridden with crime and drug running, where children carry guns as they ran errands for their trafficker bosses, a place where even catching someone's eye at the wrong moment can mean big trouble.

A large wall screens the favela from the world. Dowdney moved inside it and set up a means of persuading young people who might naturally become one of the gun-toting masses around them to concentrate their energies on something more healthy – for them, and for society. He called his new Academy Luta Pela Paz – Fight For Peace.

And from that initiative, he now finds himself with an Academy graduate on his hands with the potential to win an Olympic medal. Roberto Custodio.


Having won the Brazilian title, Custodio has now set his sights on winning the light-welterweight title at the London 2012 Olympics. He knows his claim will be disputed by boxers from Cuba and Russia, but he is set on his goal.

And he and his inspiration, Dowdney, will look back on May 2011 with nothing more than satisfaction, given that this month will mark another extension of the Fight For Peace Academy which has already been set up in the East End of London. Both were in the capital this week to help with the launch (www.fightforpeace.net).

In the meantime Deague, a 14-year-old athlete, will remember May 2011 not as the month in which FIFA were or were not given the red card, but as the month when he won his first big 100 metres race after being given a pair of spikes at the last minute.

Deague is one of 18 athletes who have been selected to train at the Diane Modahl Foundation recently established in the troubled Manchester suburb of Moss Side. It may not be a Rio favela, but it has more than its fair share of drug-related crime.

The founder has her own unhappy history with doping. Having been sent home in ignominy and tears from the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada, where she was to have defended her 800m title, Modahl engaged in a four-year battle which cost her home, and almost her sanity, before overturning the results of a manifestly erroneous positive test for testosterone and earning a reinstatement which saw her race at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Perhaps some of that sense of injustice was what prompted Modahl, herself a proud product of Moss Side, to try and make the lives of youngsters from her neck of the woods right rather than wrong.

Whatever the weather, Modahl is now engaged, along with her team of coaches, in a project which uses school premises after school to train talented young people such as Deague, working in partnership with Manchester City Council Sports Development.

Without Modahl, Deague would not have found himself lining up on the blocks at Trafford Athletic Club this month, in spikes which he said made him feel like he was "falling forward". And he would not have experienced the sensation near the end of the race of looking to his left, and then his right, and realising there was no one else there. The never-to-be-forgotten sensation.

Deague, and his fellow athletes from the Manchester Academy, will have another reason to remember May 2011 positively as they are taking part in a Sprint Masterclass organised by Nova International which allowed them to train alongside leading sprinters such as Tyson Gay, Allyson Felix, Felix Sanchez and Jessica Ennis.

In the meantime, Custodio is preparing himself for an Olympic flourish.

Today I asked him what he would be if he was not a boxer. He laughed, and struggled with the question.

"That is something I have to ask myself," he replied. "I have only ever thought about boxing."

Lo, this is the true power of sport. Which transcendeth FIFA.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames