Officials get an earful from Congress: ‘What a broken system’
WASHINGTON — Federal lawmakers excoriated international sports officials Tuesday for what they called a bungled response to the Russian doping scandal, with delayed investigations, insufficient sanctions and a lack of interest in rooting out cheating that has tarnished the Olympic brand.
During a two-hour hearing called by a House subcommittee, Democrats and Republicans chastised representatives of the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, the regulator of drugs in sports.
“What a broken system,” Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said, asking why WADA — to which the United States is the largest national contributor — took years to act on the multiple whistleblower tips it had received from within Russia, pursuing investigations only after news media reports.
“It’s been a quagmire,” Walden said, criticizing officials’ “indecisive and inconsistent” responses to revelations that some 1,000 Russian athletes were implicated in state-sponsored doping schemes.
Representatives of WADA and the IOC spoke little, accepting relentless criticism with few rebuttals. “At these sort of things, you’re always a little frustrated you can’t say more,” Richard Budgett, the IOC’s medical and scientific director, said as he prepared to depart.
Rob Koehler, the deputy director general of WADA, defended the organization’s response to the scandal, pointing to the independent investigations it had ultimately commissioned, which amassed evidence of the vast scope of Russia’s cheating that the IOC and others are continuing to review.
WADA’s president, Craig Reedie, is a member of the IOC; until August, he was a top executive with that organization as well.
“If you continue to have sport overseeing investigations, overseeing compliance, overseeing itself — it’s the fox guarding the henhouse,” Travis Tygart, the top U.S. antidoping official, told the subcommittee.
Tygart invoked an array of global reforms that he and a coalition of other national anti-doping organizations had proposed in August. Most of all, he advocated making the global anti-doping regulator more independent of sports organizations, empowering it to be an aggressive policeman.
The U.S. Olympic Committee, which is politicking to host the 2024 Summer Games, had argued against holding a hearing last year, when Tygart and anti-doping authorities from more than a dozen other nations were pressuring the IOC to ban Russia from the 2016 Games after learning the nation’s anti-doping lab chief had tampered with scores of urine samples at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., the chairman of the subcommittee on oversight and investigations, which called the hearing, said Tuesday that the inquiry was justified and that Congress’ concern went beyond its $2 million annual contribution to the global regulator.
“It isn’t just the money the United States puts into this,” Murphy said. “If it takes money to motivate things, fine, but the real reason is: I want sports to be fair.” He said he also considered doping a public health issue.
Testifying alongside the sports and anti-doping authorities were two U.S. Olympic medalists, swimmer Michael Phelps and shot-putter Adam Nelson, who told personal
anecdotes. Some lawmakers took photographs of the athletes before and after the charged discussion.
Phelps, the world’s most decorated Olympian, said he did not believe that he had ever competed in a clean field, and he echoed Tygart’s calls for making the anti-doping regulator more independent.
Nelson — who inherited a gold medal roughly a decade after he had competed, once a reporter had informed him a competitor had been disqualified for doping — said he wanted to ensure officials would not “sweep this under the rug.”
He was presented with his gold medal in the food court of an Atlanta airport, a fact numerous representatives seized on, arguing for a ceremony to honor the dozens of athletes who have retroactively won medals because of the rash of doping disqualifications over the last year.
Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., drew parallels between Tuesday’s proceeding and hearings called in the early 2000s by the same subcommittee regarding the Salt Lake Olympics corruption scandal, in which U.S. officials had bribed IOC members to win the right to host the 2002 Games.
After reading excerpts from an IOC letter on the Russian doping scandal released last week, DeGette said: “This is the same kind of gobbledygook we got from the IOC then.”
In the letter, addressed to various sports organizations, the IOC had sought to differentiate between calling Russia’s widespread cheating “state-sponsored” and calling it “institutional,” a major point of contention for Russian sports officials who have emphasized that President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle were not involved in the coordinated cheating.
“They’re looking at angels dancing on the head of a pin, and I don’t even know what they’re talking about,” DeGette said.
“The international sports community needs to realize we’re dealing with Russia,” she added, “and the honor system is simply not going to be enough.”