RUSSIA’S CLEAN GETAWAY
Going soft on reinstatement dangerous play in high-stakes fight for future of sports
The game is rigged, and will likely stay rigged. It was clear in 2016 and it is clearer still now, seven months after Russia won the men’s Olympic hockey tournament in South Korea draped in red uniforms that were supposed to be neutral, but more than anything evoked the old CCCP. The Russian fans in attendance bellowed out the banned Russian national anthem afterwards, and the players sang it on the ice. Everyone knew what it meant for Russia to be there, and to win.
“This match, let me tell you, was the most important match of my life,” said longtime Russian hockey coach Oleg Znarok, who received a congratulatory call on the bench from Vladimir Putin.
The International Olympic Committee fully reinstated Russia’s Olympic membership four days after the 2018 Olympics ended, despite a lack of resolution in Russia’s systemic doping scandal. But on Friday, the World Anti Doping Agency’s compliance review committee recommended lifting the sanction of Russia’s anti-doping agency, which had been in place since 2015. It isn’t done yet, but the path to full reconciliation has been paved. And if WADA’s compromise is accepted, the last bulwark for this test of clean sport has fallen.
“If this goes through,” said a source deeply familiar with global anti-doping who spoke on condition of anonymity, “there is no way to salvage it.”
The recommendation was subject to certain conditions. Originally, WADA required that Russia accept the devastating McLaren reports on the extent and details of the country’s systemic doping, and commit to granting full access to the discredited Moscow lab and its samples, approximately 9,000 of which require retesting.
That has been softened. Now reinstatement would require accepting the IOC’s Schmid report, which removed any reference to state knowledge of the doping system, or the role of the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency. And it would grant reinstatement before access to the lab is granted. The WADA vote is Thursday in the Seychelles.
It’s a compromise, and a capitulation. Beckie Scott, the former Canadian Olympian who is chair of WADA’s athlete committee, resigned from the compliance review committee a day after the recommendation was made public. She is one of the strongest and most principled anti-doping voices in sports; her resignation is a small earthquake, a public fracture of the last remaining dam. WADA deputy director Rob Koehler, who like Scott was known as a committed anti-doping advocate, had already resigned in early August. He hasn’t disclosed why. Maybe he knew what was coming.
Russia’s systemic and ruthless state-sponsored doping regime was uncovered in a 2014 documentary by the German public broadcaster ARD; it was confirmed by two WADA-commissioned reports led by Canadian professor and lawyer Richard McLaren and Canadian IOC member and WADA founder Dick Pound.
The Russian doping program ramped up in 2012 and spanned Olympics, Paralympics, world championships, World University Games. Urine samples were passed through holes in the laboratory wall and swapped in Sochi. The Moscow lab hid positive tests. After the vague punishment, suspected Russian hackers attacked WADA, the IOC, the vocal U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and even the opening ceremony of the 2018 Olympics. The evidence was vast.
But the biggest governing bodies groped for half-measures rather than actual punishment.
And whistleblowers like steeplechaser Yuliya Stepanova and her husband Vitaly — whose password for the WADA database, which contains locations for athletes so they can be tested, was hacked during the Rio Olympics — or Moscow doping doctor Grigory Rodchenkov were chased into hiding as other opponents of the Russian regime were poisoned in Salisbury, suffocated in London, shot dead in Kiev or fell off balconies.
The IOC provided no material support to whistleblowers when they initially needed it. Almost nobody does. It remains telling.
“A whistleblower is essentially dead meat, in terms of sport by sport,” said Pound in an interview earlier this year. “So it’s not a happy situation, and it’s certainly not designed to encourage whistleblowers. And anybody who looks at the problem from more than 10 feet away knows that whistleblowers are really your best source of information. They know what’s going on, they know what’s going on, and you’re not reduced as you are in testing of getting lucky in terms of picking the right people to test at the right time.
“No, there seems to be no institutional will to do it.” Protect them, he means.
So in soccer, ESPN’s Outside The Lines recently reported on how FIFA fired members of its independent governance committee to keep Vitaly Mutko, who had been elevated to deputy prime minister of Russia, on its executive committee before the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
And the IOC tried to keep Russia in the fold. In Korea, Pound put it this way: “More attention has been made to get the Russian athletes into the Pyeongchang Games than with dealing with Russian conduct.” He was attacked by his fellow IOC members and by the organization’s chief spokesperson, and left before the closing ceremony. English IOC member Adam Pengilly was an outspoken critic of Russian inclusion, and he was sent home after a late-night altercation with a security official, and his IOC membership will not be renewed. Pengilly may have screwed up, but how many IOC members would have seen the incident covered up?
“It shows they had been waiting, waiting, waiting for something to hit him hard with,” said one source who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
WADA, in theory, was the best bulwark if both the top-level entities like the IOC and FIFA failed, though individual federations were another option. But WADA has a puny budget of $32 million U.S. Scott did not respond to requests for comment, but sources familiar with the situation indicated that she has encountered hostility and bullying both within WADA and the Olympic movement, up to and including WADA chair Sir Craig Reedie. Former IOC Athletes’ Commission chairperson Claudia Bokel told an antidoping conference in June that she and Scott were bullied by IOC members after they pushed for a Russian ban in Rio. It’s been seen in public: IOC Athletes’ Commission members Angela Ruggiero and Tony Estanguet released a public condemnation of Scott last year after she suggested fining Russia for doping offences would be “a superficial gesture.” It’s been going on for years.
It has been vast and cynical and endemic, and borderline murderous. But Russia is winning anyway. Why? Why wasn’t the IOC — and FIFA, for that matter, the other dominant global sports power — harder on Russia? As ever, follow the money. As the white elephants and bad bets piled up around the world — Brazil might have gone bankrupt without the Games, but South Korea’s venues are already being described as white elephants — Western democracies are having a harder time justifying paying for global sports events.
Russia saved the 2014 Olympics from Pyeongchang — which four years later was a muted, distant-feeling affair — and spent lavishly on the 2018 soccer World Cup. There is a notion Russia will push Moscow for the 2032 Summer Games, too.
Similarly, Beijing will host the Winter Games in 2022 after hosting the Summer Olympics in 2008 because democratic referendums or political decisions scotched bids in Sweden, Poland and Norway, leaving the IOC with a choice: China or Kazakhstan. Like 2022, the 2026 Winter Olympics are struggling to attract bids: Stockholm is stalled, Switzerland and Austria and Japan have dropped out, Italy looks like it’s next.
Turkey could still bid, though. Autocrats don’t have to hold referendums.
And that’s where Canada comes in. Canada has positioned itself, on several fronts, as on the side of clean sports. After consultation with athletes, the Canadian Olympic Committee launched the Be Olympic campaign before Pyeongchang, which promoted both virtue and victory. COC president Tricia Smith has taken stands for clean sport, as has Pound.
“When you look at the sports system, like the WADA anti-doping code, the international federation of rules, they’re pretty good,” said Smith in an interview earlier this year. “It’s just the compliance is sometimes off, whether it’s a lack of resources or a lack of will.
“My approach, and I’m speaking as the COC president here, is know the rules. The rules have to be well-written, first of all. So I would say to the athlete, does your international federation have a rule, such as we have in international rowing, for example, that if a country has more than, say, five doping offences in a year, that they can be suspended? That the whole country can be suspended?
“If it’s in there, then any national federation — let’s say Canada had 10 doping violations in tiddlywinks, then they would be suspended. Has nothing to do with politics, has nothing to do with, ‘these are really nice people.’ This is not personal. This is just sport. And if you don’t abide by the rules in sport, what’s the point?”
But as she says, the rules are pretty good now. As in a lot of places, the problem is bigger than the rules.
“I’ve always said that the anti-doping calculus is really pretty simple,” said Pound. “You have a whole bunch of rules that everyone has adopted. Countries, federations, athletes, (national Olympic committees). And the rules are pretty clear, and the deal is that if you are offside and you break the rules, there’s basically a standard penalty for whatever it is, and it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, and that’s what happens.
“And that starts to get blurred, depending on what athletes may be involved, and what countries may be involved. I mean, you know if we’d found all this activity covering up in Guatemala, what would have happened.
“One of the big problems we’ve had with a lot of federations is, they depend on Russia to host their events and are therefore really unwilling to offend Russia, in case they run out of places to have luge or biathlon competitions or whatever the sport maybe. And then the IOC is unwilling to offend the big countries like China and Russia, and to a lesser extent the U.S.”
The Olympic movement in Canada is one party pushing a potential bid for the 2026 Olympics in Calgary; there will be a non-binding plebiscite in November to determine if there is popular support for a bid. Canada has been a strong voice for anti-doping, but if the IOC is pushing the reinstatement of the Russian Federation, how can you speak out too strongly without wrecking your chances?
Smith was in Bulgaria Monday and could not be reached, and the COC had no official comment on the WADA decision.
If you play the game, you have to know the rules.
The Institute of National Anti-Doping Organisations, which represents 67 different anti-doping entities, including Canada — and as it happens, RUSADA — released a statement Monday saying it was dismayed at the notion of a compromise, saying “it is hard not to be cynical.” USADA released a statement saying this compromise “would be a catastrophe for clean sport.”
But they’re flies on a bull. Maybe the voice of the athletes can make a difference. They are starting to speak out around the world on the RUSADA reinstatement, here and there. It’s just not a movement yet.
“I’ve always said, and nobody likes to hear it, is the only thing that scares all these sports figures would be athletes,” said Pound. “And if they get together and say, sorry, we’re not prepared to participate under these circumstances, then what happens? That’s sometimes what moves people to action.”
But absent a revolution the cake appears to be baked, and the anti-doping world outgunned in a world where money colonizes everything. The IOC sells TV rights leavened with the idea of clean sport, but not much more than that. WADA is too small, too weak, too reliant on funding from the IOC and various governments. It’s that version of the golden rule: those who have the gold make the rules, even if that gold is stripped away years after the fact. Russia ran the most comprehensive doping program since East Germany, won a gold medal in hockey and basked in the glory, flag or no flag. And Russia may be days away from getting away with it.