Russia bobs and weaves in defence

Although it has been unfolding for more than two years, it’s quite fitting that the Russian doping scandal reached its apex in 2016.

In a year when the world’s most influential democracy elected a president who spent much of his campaign lying, or accusing the media of lying, or both, there is something unmistakably Trumpian about the Russian response to the revelations of their state-sponsored doping scheme, which has been to attack the accusers but not actually disprove their claims.

So now we see if the International Olympic Committee is as easily swayed as the American voting public.

While the Russians provided the expected bluster on the weekend after Canadian law professor Richard McLaren’s second report for the World Anti-Doping Agency, sticking to the line that the allegations are unproven and that Russia has been unfairly singled out as part of a Western conspiracy against them, it’s worth taking a step back to consider just what such a conspiracy would entail.

The first evidence of a high-level Russian doping program came in a German television documentary, which included testimony from elite former Russian athletes, and which aired in December 2014. That sparked an investigation from the World Anti-Doping Agency, which appointed a commission that spent several months trying to get at the truth of the allegations in the documentary.

Investigators did not find a Russian sports operation that was keen to co-operate and provide exculpatory evidence, but quite the opposite. Athletes and coaches were frequently not where they were supposed to be, which allowed them to avoid independent drug tests, and the WADA officials reported intimidation tactics and threats directed at them in Russia.

The commission’s first report, published in November of last year, concluded that the drug-taking regime in Russian athletics was widespread. A second report published two months later detailed corruption in the executive ranks at the IAAF, track and field’s international governing body, which the commission uncovered in the process of its investigation of the allegations against Russia. Then, this past spring, Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Moscow’s WADA-approved doping-control laboratory, was the key source for reports in The New York Times and 60 Minutes that detailed a massive program of performance-enhancing drugs in Russian sport.