Are sports officials really interested in fighting doping?
Critics say it appears most just want to have plausible deniability.
Dr. Don Catlin, the father of drug testing in the United States for Olympic sports, was on the phone Sunday morning from Los Angeles. “Oh, dear,” he said. That was his reaction to being told the International Olympic Committee had decided against a complete ban of Russian athletes from the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Referring to Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, Catlin said, “I had hoped, I had thought, that Bach was going to be tough and strong.”
Yet again, when faced with evidence of a state-sponsored system of doping, the IOC professed zero tolerance but contradicted its stance with its politics.
Before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Juan Antonio Samaranch, then president of the IOC, sought to end boycotts that had threatened the Summer Games. So he awarded the Olympic Order, the IOC’s highest honor, to the East German dictator Erich Honecker.
In bestowing that award, Samaranch gave tacit approval to the East German system of doping that was widely suspected at the time. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was revealed that the East German system involved as many as 10,000 athletes, some of them unaware children who received steroids as young as 11.
“The worst thing is, he knew about it,” Dr. Arne Ljungqvist of Sweden, a former chairman of the IOC’s medical commission, said in an interview before Samaranch died in 2010.
Actually, an argument can be made that the IOC made the correct decision Sunday, that potentially clean Russian athletes should not be punished with guilt by association.
But, with the Rio Games starting Aug. 5, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for many Russian athletes to prove they have undergone regular, legitimate testing and are not using banned substances, Catlin said.
As cases from Marion Jones to Lance Armstrong have demonstrated, an athlete passing a drug test hardly means the athlete is clean. Drug use has grown increasingly sophisticated and furtive with micro-dosing and substances that can flush out of the body in hours.
“The world considers that if an organization is doing testing, then the organization has clean athletes,” said Catlin, who headed the drug-testing lab at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. “I don’t think that’s the case. We’ve seen it over and over” with the Olympics and professional leagues.
Now the eligibility of Russian athletes in Rio is left to the international federations that oversee the 28 Olympic-related sports. These federations have not exactly been vigilant when it comes to curbing the use of banned substances.
The International Boxing Association conducted zero tests out of competition in 2015. Random, unannounced tests are considered the only effective way to catch athletes who dope.
And while the International Association of Athletics Federations, track and field’s world governing body, has under widespread pressure barred Russian athletes from Rio, its former president, Lamine Diack of Senegal, stands accused of accepting bribes to cover up positive tests.
International sports officials are more concerned with plausible deniability and five-star hotel suites than with combating doping, said Charles Yesalis, a retired Penn State professor and an expert on performance-enhancing drugs.
“It’s all about marketing and perception.” Yesalis said. “They don’t care about the health of the athletes. Doping just distracts from the mom, apple pie, Chevrolet image.”
Legalizing the use of performance-enhancing drugs — with the caveat of not administering them to children — would “dramatically reduce the hypocrisy, which at this point is nauseating,” Yesalis said.
The Russia news underscores what long has been true about doping scandals. Drug testing has shown only limited effect. Instead, revelations mostly have been made by whistleblowers, reporters, the police and federal investigators.
The breadth of the Russian system only became public because Grigory Rodchenkov, the longtime director of the country’s anti-doping lab, revealed startling details to The New York Times. The reporting also revealed that the World Anti-Doping Agency did little except twiddle its test tubes.
“It just shows more proof positive of the impotency of drug testing,” Yesalis said.
Retesting from the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2012 London Games has resulted in 98 positive tests previously undetected among 1,243 samples. That’s nearly 8 percent, a startlingly high number and further indication of how widespread doping seems to be.
By comparison, when Major League Baseball conducted anonymous, penalty-free testing for steroids in 2003, when no anti-doping program was yet in place, it found only 5 to 7 percent positives.
WADA has a budget of just under $30 million, but some anti-doping experts believe that it would need a budget three times that to be considered effective. Richard W. Pound, an IOC delegate from Montreal and a former president of WADA, has repeatedly questioned whether the financing and willpower are in place to combat doping.
In a 2013 report, he wrote that “there is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense of a successful effort to deliver doping-free sport.”
At a conference in April in the Netherlands, Yannis Pitsiladis, an anti-doping expert and a member of the IOC’s medical and scientific commission, gave a sober message: The doping situation will “get worse before it gets better.”
So did the IOC on Sunday effectively wave a white flag of surrender in the battle against banned substances?
“I’ve got to think through that,” Catlin said. “I can see the point, but I don’t like the idea. I’m still believing somehow or another we can find a way to control doping, but I must say the whole Russian thing leaves me like a limp rag.”