The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
Russians deserve suspicion, but for now, also their medals
Ryan Murphy did not say he was robbed. He did not make a specific allegation against anyone. He did not directly disparage Evgeny Rylov, the Russian swimmer who had twice beat him by a fraction of a second to win Olympic gold medals.
But neither did Murphy pretend there was no basis for suspicion. Neither did he play along in polite contradiction to all the evidence of Russia’s state-sponsored doping, its extensive efforts to cover up its cheating and the toothless ban that allows Russian athletes to compete in the Tokyo Games as representatives of the Russian Olympic Committee.
“I’ve got about 15 thoughts, and 13 of them would get me into a lot of trouble,” Murphy said shortly after finishing .55 seconds behind Rylov in the 200-meter backstroke. “It is a huge mental drain to go through the year knowing that I’m swimming in a race that’s probably not clean.”
Later, seated beside Rylov at a postrace press conference, Murphy walked a rhetorical tightrope between the presumption of an individual’s innocence and the overwhelming proof of a nation’s collective guilt.
“One of the things that’s frustrating is that you can’t answer that question with 100% certainty,” Murphy said. “And I think over the years that’s come out, so I can’t answer that question. I don’t know if it was 100% clean and that’s because of things that have happened in the past.”
Though a 2019 World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) investigation found that the drug tests of at least 145 Russian athletes had been deleted or altered, its four-year ban on Russian athletes competing internationally was subsequently reduced to two years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The initial sanctions were arguably excessive in that they punished hundreds of current athletes for their country’s conduct in previous years. Yet the arrangement that allows 335 Russian athletes to compete under the banner of the Russian Olympic Committee, absent their flag and national anthem does not dispel the doubts of rival athletes or their bitterness when they get beat.
“Seeing a crew who shouldn’t even be here walk away with a silver (medal) is a nasty feeling,” American rower Megan Kalmoe Tweeted after the women’s pairs competition.
Kalmoe’s indignation is understandable. Many Olympic athletes spend years training in obscurity for a brief appearance on the world stage. To have their chances compromised by drug cheats is an injustice that can never be fully remedied. You can never adequately recapture that moment on the medals stand or the innumerable benefits that flow from it.
Yet perhaps Kalmoe paints with too broad a brush. Though drug testing is often months or years behind drug cheating, Russian medalists have so far tested clean in Tokyo.
And if the Russians have historically been more comprehensively corrupt than their rivals – according to Wikipedia,
63% of the Olympic medals that have been stripped were first awarded to athletes from former Soviet states — it would be naïve to think such tainted luminaries as Lance Armstrong, Justin Gatlin, Marion Jones and Canada’s Ben Johnson were rare exceptions to the prevailing purity of North American Olympians.
No fewer than 88 athletes were disqualified at the 2012 London Games, with 19 medals reallocated.
In 2016, 10 Olympic athletes were stripped of medals they had won eight years earlier in Beijing after their samples were reexamined in more advanced testing.
It’s possible, then, that the medal standings from Tokyo may look much different a decade from now, and that Ryan Murphy’s vague suspicions will later be substantiated as the science of drug detection gains sophistication. It’s also possible and according to our legal traditions appropriate to presume, that Evgeny Rylov beat him without the aid of chemical shortcuts.
For now, Murphy is entitled to his misgivings and Rylov to his medals.