Separation of purge and reinstate gets murkier

When the lint-rolled blazers of the International Olympic Committee get together next, they should send Nadezhda Sergeeva some flowers, maybe a car. Sergeeva is the 12th-place Russian bobsledder who was pictured in an I Don’t Do Doping sweatshirt before the Pyeongchang Games, and who was caught doping during the Pyeongchang Games. That made it hard for the IOC to give Russia its flag and colours back for the closing ceremony, which must have been hard for the IOC, because they really, really wanted to.

But it worked out great. Instead of putting their own craven lack of principle on display in front of millions or billions at the closing ceremony, the IOC had to wait. Which mostly meant that the IOC got to cloak the decision in hangovers.

Not just literal hangovers, though there were some of those. But by the time the IOC had given Russia back the keys to the house, most of the Englishlanguage journalists who had covered the Games were dead. Or, may as well have been. If you covered the Olympics, you were recovering from one of the following things: 1. Jet Lag. Oh, god. Most of the world’s English-language reporters had between nine and 17 hours to make up, and it was crushing. ESPN’s Wayne Drehs took his family to Disney World immediately after coming home. He’s a good man, Wayne, so he tried to stay awake, to shepherd the kids, to keep up with his wife. Imagine Hunter S. Thompson in Las Vegas but Disney, a good and selfless person, and with a family. 2. Sickness. When you are finished covering the Olympics the accumulated weight of the three weeks of 16-hour days, potato-chip lunches, popcorn dinners, late-night drinking sessions, early-morning breakfast sessions — when one (in the 24-hour media tent) segues into the other (in the same 24hour media tent) that is called a wraparound, which is not recommended for amateurs — the adrenalin leaks from your body, and the viruses start arranging furniture. 3. The emotional hangover. The Olympics are INTENSE. People cry.

Every day lasts a lifetime. I would ask people, for fun, what did you do two days ago, and the only person who really knew was Tariq Panja of the New York Times, because every day he chased IOC misadventures in the daily press briefing and beyond. Everyone else looked at me like I was a being from a distant planet, wreathed in fog and disorienting lights.

So afterwards you were a wreck, or you had run off to Japan, or Vietnam, or the beaches of Cambodia. Thanks to Sergeeva, the IOC accidentally managed to wait out the press and dump the official release of their indefensible news after the party had left town, with hangovers in full swing.

So thank goodness for the Oscars Sunday night, and not because The Shape Of Water winning Best Picture marked Toronto as a world leader in cinematic amphibian romance. (I would not want to be working at the aquarium downtown, when the fish-curious tourists come.) Icarus, the Netflix-funded film by Bryan Fogel, won the Oscar for Best Documentary, and deserved it. The film is transfixing; the way Fogel happens to intersect with Russian doping kingpin Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, and how their friendship becomes the only safe place in the world for the man who ran Russia’s extensive and shameless statesponsored doping scheme.

But what is most memorable is Rodchenkov’s fear.

Nikita Kamayev, the former head of Russia’s anti-doping agency RUSADA — a co-conspirator, with Rodchenkov — had just been found dead of what was described as an unexpected heart attack at 52. Vyacheslav Sinev, the founding director of RUSADA from 2008 to 2010, had died too, after allegedly telling British journalist David Walsh he would spill secrets. Rodchenkov was sure he would die if he did not flee.

Rodchenkov has lived in witness protection ever since leaving Russia, and appeared on 60 Minutes during the Games, in disguise. Like whistleblowers Yuliya Stepanova and her husband Vitaly — whose information was hacked during the Rio Games in 2016 — Rodchenkov fears for his life.

Which reminded me of the start of the Games, all those lifetimes ago, when Canadian IOC member Dick Pound told the IOC session, as part of a wide-ranging protest, that whistleblowers had “been left out there hanging alone with no protection whatsoever from the Olympic movement.”

He was right, and it’s good to be reminded of that, now that the hangovers have cleared. The IOC reinstated Russia despite the state-sponsored doping system they ran from at least 2011 to 2015 at the Olympics, the Paralympics and the World University Games; despite it producing two of the four positive doping tests at the Games; despite the identification of Russian hackers behind the cyberattack on the 2018 opening ceremony in Korea. They reinstated Russia despite RUSADA remaining, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency, non-compliant.

And they reinstated Russia despite the fact the people who blew the whistle on the most flagrant state doping system in modern times are still running for their lives, without any IOC help or encouragement. The IOC heckled Pound, rather than listened.

Among other things, Icarus showed how scary it was to be a truth-teller against big powers, and everything the IOC has done adds up to tacit support of that. You want to tell the truth, goes the message, it’s your call. We won’t help, of course. No, you’re on your own if you do it. And we’ll still give them their flag back, the first chance we get.