WADA cares more about Russia than doping

Here are the conditions that the World Anti-Doping Agency placed on its counterpart in Russia in order for that country to be reinstated to international competition in good faith: Admit you ran a state-sponsored doping outfit prior to the 2014 Sochi Olympics and give officials access to the Moscow lab where hundreds of samples were doctored.

Here is what officials from the Russian Anti-Doping Agency admitted: Nothing. Here is the amount of access it provided to the lab in question: None.

So, naturally, WADA reinstated RUSADA on Thursday, ending a nearly three-year ban that sounded dramatic at the time but made a further farce of the global effort to stage clean sport.

Don’t insult your garden-variety farces by including this among them.

To be clear, this isn’t really about what you believe about performance enhancement in sports. That should be a sophisticated discussion that informs the rules of the international athletic community. What this is about is the enforcing of the rules that do exist, and the entity charged with doing so.

Most — the vast majority? — of athletes adhere to these rules, and they simply can’t compete for the

same prizes with those who do not. And if the people who put the rules in place then fail to enforce them, the faith of the rule followers is, at the very least, shaken. By this point, really, it’s shattered.

Even before WADA’s predictable decision, the athletes are angry.

“By acting on promises, and not proven compliance, WADA’s decision on reinstating RUSADA would weaken the increasingly delicate integrity of international Sport,” a group of nearly three dozen athletes wrote in a letter to WADA President Craig Reedie. “Ignoring the established conditions also ignores the athlete’s voice that has been begging for a fair and even playing field.”

Keep in mind: This was sent earlier this week. By now, that increasingly delicate integrity lies in pieces on the floor.

WADA’s decision came in a vote of its executive committee in a meeting in — get this — the Seychelles. (Apparently, the Dayton Convention Center was booked.) It was overseen by Reedie, a Scotsman. What else does Reedie do? Well, he used to oversee the International Badminton Federation. Hmm. Wait. What’s this? Let’s doublecheck to be sure . . . well, what do you know? He’s a member of the International Olympic Committee, the group that puts on the Olympics and — oh, I don’t know — desperately needs Russia to participate to maximize its revenue.

Go down the list and note WADA executive committee members who also serve the IOC, and you find Danka Bartekova of Slovakia, Patrick Baumann of Switzerland and Ugur Erdener of Turkey. How ’bout that? The police and the promoters are one and the same.

So people with an active and invested role in staging future Olympics want Russia — one of a dwindling number of countries willing to host Games going forward — to participate in future Olympics. And if it means kicking the conditions they placed on Russia for reinstatement down the road, well, then, so be it. It would be infuriating if it wasn’t so predictable.

“It’s a far bigger issue than just whether Russia’s reinstated,” said Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, in a telephone interview. “It’s really about what type of WADA do we all want WADA to be? Do we want it to be one that has the backs of billions of sports fans who want fair play and millions of clean athletes who are demanding it? Or do we want a toothless tiger that’s the puppet of a handful of IOC sports ministers?”

In the first draft of WADA’s statement Thursday, Reedie said the “decision provides a clear timeline by which WADA must be given access to the former Moscow laboratory data and samples.”

Doesn’t it seem like we’ve heard that before? The reality, now, is it doesn’t matter what WADA says or what WADA does. The current system doesn’t work. The police department needs a new chief and new officers, people who aren’t responsible for running the local businesses. Until then, regardless of whether you care about doping in sports, the faith of the athletes will remain broken, and that colors all competitions going forward.