Faster, stronger and ... spy-er?

If you want to know my favourite thing about sports, it’s probably the deployment of spies in cars outside hotels, trying to hack the Wi-Fi.

No wait, that’s not it. Sports, in its purest form, is supposed to be about measuring the limits of human potential, not just in body but in mind. What is the potential of the human species, as we cling to this planet that we seem pretty intent on ruining as it hurtles through the universe? How high can we jump? How fast can we run? You might wink and say, swimming might be more important as the seas rise in the future, but you are discounting the increasing popularity of wildfires.

Sports are supposed to be fun and even inspiring, which is what makes them powerful. Anyway, on Thursday the U.S. Justice Department and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre, with the RCMP’s cyber crime head present, announced charges against seven members of Russia’s GRU — the KGB, rebranded as if it was a newspaper chain — with hacking not just the World Anti-Doping Agency but whoever else they could because, hey, a job’s a job.

The Russian hacker group, Fancy Bears, is alleged to have hacked WADA, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, FIFA, the International Association of Athletics Federation, and that is just the start. The U.S. attorney presenting the indictment, Scott Brady, said there were another 35 anti-doping or sporting federations. Oh, and Fancy Bears, it is alleged, is basically Russian military.

The indictment added specifics. WADA released the McLaren Report in 2016, from Canadian professor Richard McLaren and Canadian IOC member Dick Pound. After the suspension of 111 Russian athletes for the Rio Olympics, the GRU sent two hackers to Rio, where they successfully stole a USADA official’s log-in credentials by hacking a hotel Wi-Fi network. In Lausanne, Switzerland, they stole a CCES official’s log-in info by doing the same thing. Spy work: not always Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible.

There was some incompetence thrown into the indictment for good measure, like when four Russian hackers were trying to mess with the lousy Boy Scouts at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons at The Hague in the Netherlands. Dutch intelligence broke it up and the hackers abandoned the rental car, which had hacking equipment in the trunk, which included data that linked to other hacks that delivered malware. The BBC reported one such hack was the International Olympic Committee itself.

One suspect left a photo of himself at the Rio Games to be found. And finally, a Russian hacker got nabbed and had a taxi receipt on him that described a trip from the GRU to the Moscow airport. Look, proper bookkeeping is what separates us from the animals.

So in sum: Russia ran a vast doping program from 2012 to 2016. It was revealed thanks to whistleblowers who fled, and at least one of whom, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, is currently in witness protection. Russia retaliated. The Fancy Bears succeeded in releasing testing information from some 250 Western athletes that showed some funny business regarding Therapeutic Use Exemptions.

They tried to push that somewhat doctored information to some 186 reporters, to flood the public sphere with mistrust in the very nature of truth and morality.

Here, the Russian Embassy in Canada called the indictment “fake news.”

This all may sound distantly familiar, if you read the better newspapers.

So, what have we learned? We already knew the IOC chose reinstating Russia over actual penalties, over and over. We already knew that decision led WADA, poor tiny underfunded island that it is, to cave on conditions to reinstate Russia’s anti-doping agency because it had no political capital with which to work. The IOC professed ignorance of all this Thursday; even WADA was just about silent. If you live in a neighbourhood full of criminals, nobody likes the cops.

But unless American law enforcement decided to really lean into what lies beyond this indictment — the corruption that pervades international sports — this development won’t put anyone in jail, and won’t repair the gaping holes in the anti-doping net. Athletes won’t rise up and band together and force the IOC to actually take a hammer to countries with major doping problems. And it won’t make the Tokyo opening ceremony in 2020 any less awkward when Russia comes marching out, with their colours and their flag.

This indictment just gives us another version of the McLaren Report: a credible version of what actually happened. Russia hacked anti-doping agencies in the same way that they tried to hack organizations that analyzed chemical weapons, and were reinstated anyway. They undermined the very underpinning of the IOC’s pact with the people watching, and were reinstated anyway.

It tells us more clearly what you can get away with if you spend enough political muscle and money on hosting events or funding sports. As one source in the anti-doping movement who was granted anonymity due to possible repercussions put it, it is money that comes in “under the table, over the table, through the door and through the window.”

It tells us what is accepted, for the right actors. It turns out sports is about human potential in more than one way: It is also about who says “how high?” if the right people say jump. And who stoops, if need be.

Welcome to sports.