Doping hits Putin’s dreams

President Vladimir Putin has pumped vast sums into sport to refashion Russia’s image and bolster his personal prestige, but the scandal over state-run doping threatens to obliterate any successes. The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) executive board are to hold a conference call on Sunday to discuss barring Russia from the Rio Olympics starting on August 5 over jaw-dropping doping revelations. That move comes with Russia’s track and field squad already barred from the competition over evidence of state-sponsored cheating.

Judo-loving former KGB agent Putin has often lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union and his determination to use sport to harness national pride has echoes in the Communist-era clashes between East and West. “Under Putin the greatness of the country is measured not only in the number of rockets, warheads, tanks and planes, but by the amount of medals won, champions and victories,” Konstantin Kalachev, head of the Moscow-based Political Expert Group think tank, said.

“Russia is rising from its knees, becoming a great power again and that means returning to the things that we were proud of during the USSR.” Since coming to power 16 years ago Putin has staked his personal reputation on bringing major sporting events to Russia in a bid to recast the country as a resurgent force on the international stage after the upheavals of the 1990s.

In 2007, he flew to Guatemala to personally plead Russia’s eventually successful case to hold the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and then splurged over $50 billion on hosting it. Next up, Russia will be holding the football World Cup in 2018. “Nobody says now that sporting victories are proof of the supremacy of our way of life but winning is a means for increasing patriotism,” says Yevgeny Slyusarenko, Deputy Editor of Russian sports website Championat.com. “Like during the USSR, sport is used for some internal aims — now it is patriotism, increasing the prestige of the authorities inside the country.” While Putin has furiously denied that there is any staterun doping programme in Russia, analyst Kalachev said that the Kremlin’s thirst for victory was likely fuelling the cheating.

“Some here like to say that Putin’s ideal is the GDR (former Communist East Germany),” Kalachev said, pointing to the country where the Kremlin leader served as a KGB officer and which ran a notorious doping campaign.

“The successes of the GDR in sport relied heavily on doping. History is now repeating itself.”