Canada’s Dunfee was well aware of scandal
Race walker began blogging last year about doping issues within Russia’s system
Almost a year ago, Canadian race walker Evan Dunfee started blogging about seemingly widespread doping among Russian racewalkers.
He exposed an Olympic and world champion for continuing to compete while under a doping ban, and went so far as to track down the release date of a particular running shoe to expose Russian attempts to cover up what he’d already found. It was a nice bit of investigative work.
And he wrote this: “The handling of this case by the Saransk training centre (for Olympic race walkers) as well as members of Russian Athletics has so far been to lie, cover-up and manipulate information. I believe I make a case here for the first time that . . . corruption exists within Russian Athletics.”
Now, the rest of the world knows Dunfee was right all along.
Over the course of 335 pages, a World Anti-Doping Agency panel led by Canadian lawyer Dick Pound has found that the Russian government, athletics administrators, testing officials and individual coaches and athletes were complicit in widespread doping and cover-ups.
It amounts to a “state-sponsored” doping regime.
Much of the report does read like a Cold War spy novel, with athletes using false identifies to avoid testing, bribing officials to ensure clean results and intimidation of lab workers. And, when all that fails, using police to intercept samples before they get to an independent lab. One diligent doping control officer went so far as to jump out a window with samples and, another time, smuggled them out of the country in his luggage.
While no clean athlete wants to know that doping among their competitors may be even more widespread than previously thought, Dunfee and his race walking friends — some of whom are sure they lost Olympic medals to cheating Russians — are happy about this report.
“It’s damning and it doesn’t hold back,” Dunfee said in a phone interview from Australia, where he’s training.
“Knowing the work we’ve done . . . to bring this to light and make people care about this when it only seemed to relate to the race walking community and nobody wanted to pay attention, it does feel like vindication. It’s a pretty emotional report to read through sitting down the hall from Jared (Tallent) right now and knowing that he, more than likely, has a gold medal coming to him.”
Tallent, an Australian, came second in the London Olympic 50-km race walk to Russian Sergey Kirdyapkin. His doping ban, with dates cherrypicked by Russia’s anti-doping agency to allow him to keep his London medal and compete in Rio, is still under investigation.
“That’s the sad part,” Athletics Canada head coach Peter Eriksson, said.
“The athletes that got shafted from this whole thing from the 2012 Olympics, and even Olympics before that, who were close to making the final . . . and maybe could have won a medal and never had that chance because the sport was infiltrated by cheaters,” he said.
“In Russia, it’s a systematic approach from government on and that’s why the country needs to be banned and out of the Olympic Games for at least one or two cycles,” Eriksson said.
Eriksson hopes this report serves to draw attention to doping in sport beyond Russia’s borders as well.
“Russia is a big part of the iceberg but it’s not only piece that needs to be investigated,” he said, noting many countries have sub-par doping programs.