RUSSIAN SHENANIGANS VALIDATED
Reinstatement of its anti-doping agency ‘devastating blow to clean sport,’ says Scott
In the early pages of the International Olympic Committee’s Schmid report, the findings of which Russian sports officials agreed to accept after they balked at agreeing to the much harsher terms of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s McLaren report, there is an explanation of key people involved in the yearslong Russian doping scandal.
Among those named are Nikita Kamaev, the executive director of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, and Viatcheslav Sinev, the chairman of its board.
The Schmid report goes on to say, in typical bland reportese: “Mr. Viatcheslav Sinev and Mr. Nikita Kamaev both died respectively on 3 and 14 February, 2016.”
Hell of a coincidence, that. It has been almost four years since a German television documentary first revealed the shocking scope of Russian doping efforts with the fallout finally coming to an end with Thursday’s news that WADA has reinstated RUSADA in a compromise that was at once incredibly weak and utterly predictable.
Beckie Scott, the Canadian cross-country skier who resigned from WADA’s compliance review committee when it became apparent that the compromise was coming, said she was “profoundly disappointed” on Thursday. She said WADA had “dealt a devastating blow to clean sport. I’m quite dismayed.”
That about nails it. Rather than serve as an example of the punishment that awaits nations that develop doping programs, the Russian experience provides a road map on how to do it and how to respond when you are caught: Involve the highest levels of the sports hierarchy, then bluster and obfuscate as long as you can and then eventually apologize and plead to a lesser punishment. You don’t think other autocrats are taking notes?
Over the course of many investigations and reports since the original doping revelations, the denials from Russia have become more and more narrow. First it was all lies, dreamed up by some disgruntled former athletes and supported by schemers in the West.
Then it was mostly lies, the work of rogue operatives in an otherwise noble anti-doping program. Now the Russians are willing to admit that, yes, their anti-drug regime failed miserably, but they insist that it did not reach into the highest levels of government.
President Vladimir Putin and Vitaly Mutko, his former deputy and minister of sport at the peak of the doping scandal, can continue to insist that they were shocked — shocked! — to learn that any gambling was taking place in this establishment.
And, as it happens, a couple of the people in a position to know whether the doping scheme was carried out with the blessing of the state, as has been alleged all along by Russian whistleblowers, are dead.
That Russia would eventually get to this point, with the book on the doping scandal effectively closed without it ever having to admit the scope of what it had done, is not particularly surprising. From the moment that German documentary aired, it has avoided the type of co-operation with investigators that would be expected of an innocent, aggrieved party. Russian officials dodged doping-control officers, they stashed athletes on guarded military bases, they destroyed thousands of urine samples and refused to hand over thousands more.
Along the way, they spread the message at home that Russian athletes were being unfairly targeted by a Western campaign to discredit Russia’s success at Sochi 2014. When Richard McLaren, the Canadian lawyer who spearheaded the largest of the investigations into the doping scheme, presented his preliminary findings at a Toronto hotel in the summer of 2016, reporters with RT, the Russian state broadcaster, got into a heated exchange with representatives of ARD, the German station that had kicked the whole thing off.
It didn’t quite amount to a scuffle, but the message from the Russian side was clear: This story was merely a plot carried out by the country’s traditional rivals, supported by unscrupulous Russian liars whose word was being taken as gospel.
The Russians haven’t been able to hold to that line, not with the mountains of documentary evidence provided by Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the Moscow anti-drug lab. Russian officials originally blasted him as a crazed fabulist and criminal, but after it turned out that he had emails that showed how Russia protected its medal hopefuls and after WADA investigators found that urine samples had been tampered with — just like Rodchenkov had alleged — the official line from Moscow became, “OK, fine, we screwed up, but it was mostly that guy’s fault.”
This is the lie that WADA’s compromise allows Russia to maintain.
The Schmid report took a distinctly softer position than the earlier one from McLaren, which described the massive doping scheme as being directed by the state itself. It does not come as a shock that Mutko and Putin prefer the Schmid version.
In the end, the story of the Russian doping scandal is simple. After a poor performance at Vancouver 2010, the country embarked on a multi-pronged drug program — run, creatively, by its top anti-drug officials — to improve its showing at subsequent Olympics.
It worked brilliantly: Russia was fourth on the table in terms of gold-medal results at London 2012 and first at Sochi 2014.
When it was caught, it pitched enough of a fit to get through Rio 2016 relatively unscathed (fourth again) and eventually submitted to the partial ban in Pyeongchang, where it was excluded, but its athletes were not.
Ask the athletes from other countries who didn’t make the podium while 17 Russians did if they think that was a suitable sanction.
Russia dominated Sochi, which is what it wanted. Even though it was caught cheating on an unprecedented scale, it has outlasted the scandal and still celebrated its athletes at two more Olympics.
If they had the chance, Russia wouldn’t hesitate to do it all over again. Given WADA’s response, why would they worry?
The Russian experience (on doping) provides a road map on how to do it and how to respond ... You don’t think other autocrats are taking notes?