Mother Russia puts ‘medals over morals’
Paralympics ban founded in ‘entirely compromised’ anti-doping system
Into the breach that paralyzed the International Olympic Committee, Sir Philip Craven and the International Paralympic Committee came at a gallop.
When Craven, the IPC president, announced Russian Paralympic athletes would be banned en masse from the Rio Paralympics next month, it was a tonic for a sporting world that has seen its share of moral equivalence.
This is not to say there wasn’t a real issue for the IOC and the IPC both to decide.
There was — the rights of possibly clean Russian athletes versus the need to hold the Russian state responsible for its widespread doping and unbridled cheating as painted in a harrowing recent report by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren.
But while the IOC and boss Thomas Bach can defend their decision to avoid what he labelled “the nuclear option” and instead hand the ball off to international sports federations with the result the majority of Russian Olympians were allowed to compete at Rio, Craven and the IPC need no such defence.
As in the courtroom, where witness testimony is often said to have “the ring of truth,” what Craven said last weekend has the ring of right, if you like.
The IPC didn’t just read the McLaren report and in the fashion of the day merely “react” to it.
Craven and members of the IPC’s governing council digested and discussed the report at length.
Then they asked McLaren and his officials for additional information about the 35 samples related to Para athletes from 2012-15; McLaren replied with the names of those athletes who gave the samples and the drugs for which they had tested positive.
Then, because McLaren’s work has been extended and continues, his staff provided an additional 10 samples related to nine more Paralympic athletes.
Twenty-seven of that grand total were related to athletes who compete in eight Paralympic sports (the others compete in games not in the Paralympics), five of them summer sports (such as those on the Rio schedule), three for winter sports (such as those on the Sochi schedule).
And 11 of those 27 samples were positives that by the alchemy of Mother Russia were turned into negatives — what McLaren called the “disappearing positive methodology” or DPM.
Then, fearing Russian Paralympic athletes also had been part of a different scheme that was run only at Sochi — whereby dirty urine was swapped for clean urine through a purpose-built hole in the wall of the testing lab — the IPC sent 21 samples from Russian Paralympians who had competed at Sochi.
Of the 19 bottles that could be forensically examined, 18 showed the same signs of tampering McLaren’s gang had found with Russian Olympians, leading Craven to conclude the Paralympians “were included in the broader doping scheme.”
The IPC then asked its own anti-doping people and those at the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) what measures it can take against the individual athletes; that is yet to unfold.
The IPC will also reanalyze samples of every Russian Paralympian from Sochi.
Still, the organization didn’t act, but sought and got written submissions from the Russian Paralympic Committee, whose members then travelled to Bonn, Germany, to make a final pitch in person to the governing council.
In the end, the Russians couldn’t convince the council they could live up to their IPC anti-doping obligations.
“These facts really do hurt,” Craven said. “They are an unprecedented attack on every clean athlete who competes in sport. The anti-doping system in Russia is broken, corrupted and entirely compromised.”
He said the Russian government had “catastrophically failed its Paralympic athletes” with its “medals over morals mentality.”
It was a tough decision made by a tough organization, more nimble and braver than the unwieldy IOC.
And it was a unanimous verdict made by a group of 15, including two Canadians, which counts among its members no few than six former Paralympians.
The Russians have promised to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and fair enough — avenues of appeal protect against miscarriages of justice.
But if, as Craven said, the decision caused the members to have many sleepless nights because this wasn’t “about athletes cheating a system, but about a state-run system cheating the athletes,” those nights should be over.
The Paralympics and the IPC had, more than its big brother the Olympics and the IOC, a good name to protect. They have done what is necessary to do that.
These facts really do hurt. They are an unprecedented attack on every clean athlete who competes in sport.