Out, but still in?
Russian sliding bosses, somehow, are continuing to flout IOC sanctions
PYEONGCHANG — Was Albert Demchenko there on the mountain or was he not?
Wolfgang Harder, press officer for the International Luge Federation (FIL) believes he was.
“He’s here,” Harder said confidently before the first two runs of the men’s luge singles event began on Saturday. “He’s got a spectator ticket.”
But that, it turned out, may have been Demchenko’s look-a-like brother, who was spotted in the stands by a Russian journalist. Or not.
Or it may have been the real deal, the 46-year-old grand man of Russian luge himself and one of those who offers living proof that, when it comes to Russians, all the sanctions and stern condemnations in the world add up to squat.
And the astonishing thing is that the coach of the Russian national team, who was banned-then-unbanned-butnot-invited to these Olympics, might well have been in attendance when three of his sliders competed Saturday night and no one in authority in Russian sporting circles (or even from the FIL) likely would have been troubled by it.
In the proverbial sweet spot where pedal hits the metal, the powers that be — the International Olympic Committee, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the FIL and other sports federations — have blinked and the Russians have not.
Wolf Staudinger, the head coach for Canada’s luge team, said he’s never seen anything like it, the combination of machinations, turning of wheels within wheels and the sheer unmitigated chutzpah the Russians have brought to sport.
“Lance Armstrong (the notorious cyclist and doper) was one thing,” Staudinger said after the first night of luge competition. “This (the Russian doping scandal and its aftermath) is on a whole different level. It’s disgusting.”
On Dec. 5 last year, the IOC executive board suspended Russia from the Pyeongchang Games in the fallout from the Richard McLaren report, which documented the pervasive state-sponsored doping which ran rampant in Russian sport from 2011 to 2015 and peaked at the Sochi Olympics four years ago.
So-called “clean” athletes, 168 of whom are in Pyeongchang, were invited by the IOC to compete as Olympic athletes from Russia, under a neutral flag.
But McLaren’s was essentially a report about Russian government and institutional corruption.
It was the IOC’s disciplinary commission which examined the evidence against individual Russian athletes, and which later that month banned 43 of them for doping violations and ordered them to return their medals from Sochi, where, as it happens, Demchenko had won two silvers, one in the men’s singles, one in the mixed team event.
Thirty-nine of them appealed to the CAS, and 28 succeeded, in that their suspensions were lifted and their medals ordered returned.
But when they weren’t “invited” to these Games, they again appealed to the CAS and won. Demchenko was among them.
On his Facebook page, he was remarkably forthright and even posted the letter of suspension he received, which pointed to the fact that he was on the so-called “Duchess List” at Sochi.
Thirty-seven names were on it, all powerhouse athletes like him who were automatically protected from positive dope tests. They supplied “clean” urine samples which were to be automatically swapped at the lab to save them from a positive result.
The cocktail itself was unusual — “mouth wash”, its inventor and the doctor who became the prime whistleblower in the scandal, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, called it — and the disciplinary com- mission said “it was not conceivable” an athlete wouldn’t have known he was being protected.
The cocktail was a mix of three steroids but could be detected in only a very short window of time.
But Demchenko was dismissive of the evidence against him: There were no scratches on his test tubes, suggesting they’d been tampered with; there were none of the other telltale signs, only his name on the Duchess List.
“But you’re on the list !!!! ”, he mocked the IOC in a Facebook post on Dec. 23. “Give me the medals!!!”
Neither Demchenko nor another still-competing Russian luger, Tatyana Ivanova, have been sanctioned by their international federation.
Demchenko remains the president of the Russian luge federation.
Aleksandr Zubkov, a double gold-medallist from Sochi in the two and four-man bobsleigh who is also banned for life for doping from the Olympics, is still the president of Russian Bobsleigh and Skeleton. The international federation briefly “provisionally suspended” him and others, but another arm of the federation, the doping panel, promptly lifted the suspension.
Zubkov is still the bobsleigh boss.
Whether at the luge track here in the flesh, or just in spirit, Demchenko still has the reins of the national team. He is the mentor for the young Russians who raced Saturday. As Wolf Staudinger put it: “In December, okay, they’re (the Russians) out. Then, two weeks ago, they were out in force — every athlete, every official. It was a demonstration of (raw power), ‘This is us.’”
How can this be, that men convicted or suspected of doping are still in leadership positions, that banned athletes are still competing in international events if not the actual Olympics?
Well, it be, baby. It be.