DAY THEY DESTROYED THE OLYMPICS
MATT LAWTON
THE International Olympic Committee destroyed the Olympics yesterday. Shame on Thomas Bach, the toothless IOC president who enjoys such a cosy relationship with Vladimir Putin, and the similarly spineless members of the IOC board.
Shame, too, on the Russians who will now breeze into Rio fuelled by a state-sponsored doping programme and compete for gold, silver or bronze.
We should not be entirely surprised by the IOC’s failure to issue a blanket ban to Russian athletes yesterday. As FIFA, the IAAF and cycling’s UCI have demonstrated in recent years, the major international governing bodies cannot be trusted to run their own sports.
Even the World Anti-Doping Agency has failed sport on this one because too little has been done far too late to tackle a doping problem that goes way beyond Russia’s borders.
Remember, Russian whistleblowers
first approached WADA about systematic doping in their country as long ago as 2012. But what did they do when a medallist from the London Olympics, Darya Pishchalnikova, contacted them to say she was using performanceenhancing drugs on the instruction of the Russian sports and antidoping authorities? Rather than launch an inquiry WADA forwarded her email to the same Russian sports authorities.
Travis Tygart, the head of the US anti-doping agency who led the investigation into Lance Armstrong, said the IOC had ‘refused to take decisive leadership’ yesterday and in doing so they have inflicted further damage to the already battered credibility of Olympic sport.
Elements of the IOC’s explanation for their stance were farcical, with the most glaring inconsistency being the treatment of convicted Russian drug cheats compared to dopers from other countries. If you’ve served your ban but you’re not Russian, you can compete in Rio. If you are Russian you cannot. See how long that lasts once the athletes affected by this policy get some decent legal advice.
Passing the buck and leaving it to the individual sports federations to sort through the mess only 11 days before the start of the Games is similarly ludicrous, given that more than 300 Russian men and women are involved. They will be subjected to a ‘rigorous out-of-competition anti-doping regime’ between now and the Games — another empty promise and a situation that is likely to prove all too easy to manipulate.
The IOC really are a joke. It was not even possible for international journalists to dial into Bach’s tele-conference yesterday and over the weekend the Australian Olympic Committee said the accommodation for their athletes at the Olympic village in Rio was uninhabitable because of plumbing problems and serious fire risks. Indeed it was only last week that the drug-testing laboratory in Rio was reinstated, having been suspended last month.
As for Russia, it was not enough for the IOC that the McLaren report exposed ‘disappearing positives’ in Russia across more than 20 Olympic sports. Not enough that it was only this year, after the suspension of the Russian antidoping agency, that the Russian authorities were obstructing UK Anti-Doping testers trying to set up an emergency testing programme in the country.
Clearly Bach was not prepared to go to war with Putin when the Russians were so supportive of his campaign to become IOC president and here, in microcosm, is the problem across the political sporting sphere. These people are essentially members of a private club, with those who dare to expose corruption in their sports — from athletes and officials to journalists — treated with suspicion and too often cast as the enemy. ‘A declaration of war on our sport’ was how the IAAF’s Lord Coe so memorably put it. ‘I hope this is sending a positive message to future generations of Russian athletes,’ declared Bach yesterday, and make of that what you will.
Mike Morgan, a prominent anti-doping lawyer, considered yesterday ‘the beginning of the end of the WADA code’, and he is certainly right about that.
But this feels like the beginning of the end of the Olympics unless something drastic happens and the people who climb to the summit of sports politics are held more accountable for their mistakes.
Only now are we discovering the extent to which athletes were doping in London in 2012 and Beijing four years before that. But we go to Rio already knowing that cheats are being allowed to compete. The failure to properly tackle the Russian doping epidemic also applies to countries like Kenya, where the use of banned performance-enhancing substances is rife.
For the clean athletes it is a tragic situation. They have been let down more than anyone because they now find themselves as the innocent participants in what is going to feel like a freak show.