CLEAN ATHLETES COULD PAY PRICE FOR RUSSIA’S STATE-BACKED DOPING
The thing about the Russians is, they make for excellent villains.
A state-orchestrated system of doping to improve athletic performance after the feeble medal haul of the 2010 Olympics? Considering Russia sank untold billions into briefly transforming the southern resort town of Sochi into a suitable site for a winter Games so it could make a good showing to the world, the idea of state-run doping sounds like a comparatively minor inconvenience.
Agents of the secret police working incognito in the Sochi drug lab, swapping out drug samples in the dead of night through a little hole in the wall of the secure facility? Officers in the military police complicit in hiding dirty athletes and deployed to harass the poor doping-control officers who were trying to find them? Sure, I’ve seen Rocky IV. Those Russian cops are trouble.
And all of it coming from the highest levels of government, directed by a Minister of Sport who was once accused of spending $4,500 on breakfast alone at the Vancouver Games, and who is a key ally of President Vladimir Putin — who himself is comically egotistical, right up until you remember the part about dead witnesses and the annexation of sovereign nations. Then, less comical.
It’s all perfectly plausible. If you were making a list of the countries most likely to develop a widespread doping scheme run by the same organization that ostensibly exists to catch dopers, you would put Russia and China at the top in some order and could basically stop there.
And so, as the International Olympic Committee considers an outright ban on Russia from Rio, a decision that became a little more likely on Thursday after the international Court for the Arbitration of Sport upheld the IAAF ban on Russia’s track and field athletes, it is at least somewhat easy to wrap one’s head around what the IOC might do: Ban hundreds of athletes who have never tested positive for steroids from competing at the Olympics.
It’s easier not just because the evidence assembled by multiple WADA-commissioned investigations is compelling, even if they haven’t provided all of it to the general public, but because it’s how we have come to view the Putin government, especially in recent years: Forever sticking its finger in the eye of the West, whether rolling tanks into neighbouring countries, or backing the Assad regime in Syria. Of course these guys would oversee a doping program so they could reclaim Soviet-era athletic dominance. The president did once work for the KGB, after all.
And because Russians make such natural bad guys, we find it easier to shrug off the consequences of a total ban, which includes the exclusion of clean Russian athletes due to the actions of people they might never have met.
Guilt by association is not normally how drug bans work.
When asked about that possibility at his news conference on Monday, Richard McLaren, the Canadian lawyer who delivered the latest WADA-backed bomb on Russia, called it “an unfortunate consequence.”
The particularly cruel twist is that the doping operation McLaren described in his report gave preference to athletes most likely to be medal contenders. It was likely to freeze out those Russians who didn’t want to take part. So, if you were an athlete dedicated to competing clean, or not good enough to warrant government attention and support, you could end up with the same ban as those who were happily swilling state-prescribed steroid cocktails diluted in scotch and martinis, even though you probably had to work even harder than them to qualify for Rio.
It’s worth noting this not because an outright ban is the wrong move, but because no other alternative is the right one. The upshot of the WADA reports is that the drug testing that took place in Russia has been, for years, meaningless.
When a positive test could be “disappeared,” to use McLaren’s phrasing, the lack of positives for any athlete is hardly exculpatory.
That doesn’t make the punishment against a clean athlete any more comfortable, just that there is no other way around it.
In its ruling on Thursday, the CAS acknowledged the IAAF provision — to allow Russian athletes who could prove they had been regularly tested outside the Russian system to request an exemption from the ban — was nice in concept, but unworkable in practice. It’s impossible to retroactively compile a doping history.
At his news conference this week, a Russian reporter asked McLaren, plaintively, “why single out Russia?” His response was that Russia is what WADA asked him to investigate. Which is true.
It was Russia that had former athletes describe doping techniques for a German documentary that aired more than a year ago. It was Russia whose former lab director later described the doping program in great detail for U.S. reporters. It was Russia that was, as McLaren said, “singularly unhelpful” when WADA investigators tried to follow up on those claims.
Do other countries cover up doping? And would we be so quick to call for a national ban if this was, say, France? Quite possibly, and quite possibly not.
But it’s a little like getting a ticket for speeding and then complaining that other drivers are going fast, too. The evidence, here, is against Russia. It looks more and more like its athletes, all of them, will pay for it.