We had to stand firm to protect clean athletes
Decision to ban federation was tough but tainted system casts doubt on all those who are part of it
Still smarting from the news that its athletics team are banned from the Rio Olympics, Russia has now been warned that its troubles are only likely to worsen as attention turns to its doping indiscretions in other sports.
Despite desperate pleas and protestations that it had cleaned up its act over recent months, Russia learned on Friday evening that its exile from international athletics would remain in place for the Rio Games in August.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed yesterday that it would not be offering a lifeline to Russian athletes and The Daily Telegraph understands that the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) is now keen on turning its attention to Russian doping offences across other sports.
Rune Andersen, chairman of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Taskforce that recommended the continuation of Russia’s ban, offered a thinly veiled threat that things were only expected to worsen.
“Who believes this only applies to track and field?” asked Andersen, who confirmed he had gathered evidence pertaining to other sports during the course of his own limited-scope athletics investigation.
“It doesn’t make sense, that it is only limited to athletics. There has been a call from athletes that Wada must go and do a better job. There is a job for Wada to do and president Craig Reedie has been asked to do more.”
Should Wada indeed decide to delve deeper, it is certain to find no shortage of alleged scandals.
The organisation has already appointed an independent commission to investigate admissions by Grigory Rodchenkov, the exiled former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, that he took part in a quite staggering government-aided programme of replacing samples with clean urine at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
A spate of positive drugs tests has also left Russia’s weightlifters anticipating their own Olympic ban, while Vitaly Mutko, the country’s sports minister, has denied allegations that he helped cover up a failed test supplied by a Russian top-flight footballer.
Only this week, swimming’s governing body urged more whistle-blowers to come forward and aid the fight against doping after fresh claims that senior Russian anti-doping officials offered to stop testing swimmers for money in the build-up to London 2012.
“Reasonable people will conclude that the Russian trackand-field team should be banned, but not see that there is sufficient evidence yet to ban other sports,” said John Leonard, director of the World Swimming Coaches Association. “The whole nation should be banned, though I doubt that will happen.”
With athletics, weightlifting, swimming, football and every winter discipline already implicated, it is not only Russia’s Olympic place that appears in jeopardy, but Russian representation in sporting competitions worldwide.
Already raging over criticism of its football fans’ conduct at the European Championship, Russian officials and media outlets reacted with fury to the Olympic athletics suspension. Olympic high jump champion Anna Chicherova was among those critical of the exclusion decision, calling it ‘‘too harsh for those who have never been involved in doping scandals’’.
With the confirmation there will be no Russian flags flying at Rio athletics, President Vladimir Putin has predictably gone on the offensive, with officials announcing that criminal proceedings have been opened against Rodchenkov.
“It is unjust and unfair,” Putin said yesterday of the IAAF decision. “There are universally recognised principles of law and one of them is that the responsibility should be always personified. If some of the members of your family have committed a crime, would it be fair to hold all the members of the family liable, including you? That is not how it’s done.
“The people who have nothing to do with violations, why should they suffer for those who committed the violations? That actually does not go into the framework of civilised behaviour.”
Yet there is little that is civilised in the lengths that Russian athletes and security services were revealed to still be resorting to in a bid to cheat the system – such overwhelming evidence that doubtless played a large role in the IOC’s announcement yesterday that it will not seek to intervene or overturn the IAAF’s decision.
While the judgment to keep Russia’s ban in place was largely anticipated in light of startling reports of continual doping violations, the IAAF’s move to open a “tiny, tiny crack in the door” for Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag if they can prove they are untainted by the disgraced system was unexpected and a potential legal masterstroke.
It is understood that barely three or four athletes would fulfil the criteria, although whether any of them – aside from exiled America-based whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova – would upset Mother Russia by applying to do so is highly doubtful.
Nonetheless, the simple inclusion of the clause, and the hard-hitting verdict that the Russian culture of doping “has not changed” since the revelations first emerged more than 18 months ago, was enough to prevent the IOC from tinkering with the IAAF’s decision.
“The IOC welcomes and supports the IAAF’s strong stance against doping,” it said. “The IOC executive board emphasises that it fully respects the IAAF position. The eligibility of athletes in any international competition including the Olympic Games is a matter for the respective international federation.”
Instead, the IOC announced it would turn its attention to other countries declared non-compliant with the Wada code, including Kenya and Mexico. As for investigations into further Russian doping offences, Seb Coe, IAAF president, said he hoped other governing bodies might copy his organisation’s blueprint.
“If we have in any way created a road map or template for other sports, then that has to be a virtuous outcome,” he said. There are many who hope this is only the start for Russia.
A spate of positive drug tests has left Russia’s weightlifters anticipating their own Olympic ban
There were no winners or losers in Vienna on Friday when the International Association of Athletics Federations Council met to make arguably the biggest judgment in the history of our sport, to uphold the ban on Russian athletes.
In November last year, after the publication of the first report from the independent World Anti-Doping Agency Commission detailing the scale of doping violations in Russia, we suspended the All-Russia Athletic Federation (ARAF).
I remember the night we made that decision very well. While we were all focusing on how to make our sport safer from drug cheats, an act of unspeakable barbarity was taking place on the streets of Paris. We ended our conference call that evening with a heavy heart but a belief that with clear guidelines, the right people and a cooperative approach, processes could be fixed and ARAF would be reinstated in time for the Rio Olympic Games.
The IAAF Council is a broad church. It has Olympic champions and world record-holders. It has coaches who have plied their trade at the highest level of their sport. It has federation presidents who have devoted, in most cases, well over half their lives to a sport that they are passionate about and to the protection of clean athletes.
On Friday, in Vienna, when the independent taskforce slowly and methodically reported their conclusive findings to my council, the mounting and, yes, daunting, realisation of the scale of what we still face in Russian athletics shook every one of my colleagues. Rune Andersen, the independent chairman, ploughed on amid total silence.
Yes, there had been progress, and this should be noted, but at the heart of the report was a fundamental reality that corroborated everything that had gone before, a system that did not recognise the basic principle of sport – that protecting athletes, and providing a safe and clean environment within which they can compete, is not a negotiating tool.
It is a right for an athlete and it is a responsibility for everyone else in sport. Here was a system that failed every athlete in Russian athletics.
It is inevitable that in the aftermath of Friday’s decision, which, in essence, means the absence of Russian athletes in Rio, our decision has been subject to any number of interpretations. In some quarters, the suspension in November was only a slap across the wrist while we figured out how, in short order, we could get Russian athletes back into the athletics competitions in Rio. Even the creation of the taskforce, which presented its damning findings to us on Friday, was viewed as purely a cosmetic exercise – and all this was being played out to the mood music of “sport will do what it always does and circle the wagons”, ignoring public sentiment and the concerns of the competitors and ticking boxes on a sheet of banal criteria. Friday’s decision could not be further from this.
So, we are now faced with critics claiming we have made an unfair decision on clean athletes in Russia. I want to be very, very clear on this. We did not make a decision on clean athletes. We evaluated a system and a culture within which all athletes in Russia are competing, a tainted system that cast doubts on every athlete who is part of it.
And let me address a second observation – that our tough decision on Friday was somehow leavened by a “fudge”. This decision was not about politics. It was not about geography. We all recognise there are Russian athletes living outside the tainted system.
Some of them made the tough personal decision to get out and are now training in systems that are effective and safe. It is these athletes we believe should be offered the opportunity to compete, not for Russia, but for themselves and for all clean athletes.
I am used to being a punch bag for sport. I fought long and hard and against the British establishment to be allowed to compete in Russia in 1980 in defiance of a wider boycott. The attacks on me, my fellow athletes and my family, because we believed it was important to fight for sport, were the subject of many media articles and mentions in one or two books.
I am comfortable with the choices I have made and I know that the work my council, my team and I are doing within the IAAF will change this sport forever. It is worth fighting for.
I have said before, and sadly I will probably have to say it on other occasions too, that preventing clean athletes from doing what they were born to do does not come naturally to me nor to any of my colleagues who were in that room on Friday. There was no back-slapping after we made that decision, only a feeling of deep sadness that a country should have so badly failed its athletes and been the architects of their dismissal from the biggest sporting event on the planet. And this is the crucial point: we have not prevented clean athletes from Russia from competing, rather the Russian system has cataclysmically failed their clean athletes.
What we need to do now is work together to get the system fixed and the athletes back where they belong – on the track and in the field.
‘The basic principle of sport, providing a safe environment for competitors, is not a negotiating tool’