SCANDALOUS TO HILARIOUS TO FARCICAL
Russians react in predictable fashion to McLaren’s Olympic doping report
Quid pro quo, Donald.
Vladimir Putin and Russia’s almost certainly state-sponsored cybercriminals supported your campaign and helped you get elected leader of the free world. Time to pay up. Friday in London, Canadian law professor Richard McLaren issued Part 2 of his independent investigation into the corruption of doping samples involving Russian athletes at the London and Sochi Olympics — this time with bar codes identifying specific athletes, and emails and “irrefutable evidence” of samples illegally opened and tampered with — and the sheer scale of the deceit is appalling, as we knew it would be.
McLaren’s report lays bare an “institutional conspiracy ... on an unprecedented scale” of the Russian Sports Ministry, its national anti-doping agency and the FSB (KGB’s successor) that involved more than 1,000 athletes in more than 30 sports.
In typical knee-jerk fashion, also totally predictable, the Russians promptly denied any state involvement and dismissed McLaren’s findings as undeserved persecution by the West … and here’s where the story ascends from merely scandalous to hilarious.
“After all, there is no proof. There’s going to be an additional stream of falsehoods and baseless accusations,” Igor Lebedev, chairman of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party, told R-Sport.
Pause here, and consider what it takes to be considered “farright” in Putin’s Russia.
Then add in “Liberal Democratic Party,” and if you’re not already laughing …
“All of this means that they don’t have any facts and they don’t have any proof. Trust me, if they did, then the fight would’ve been on a different level and more serious. All of this has very strong political overtones, and we hope Russians’ favourite Trump will put a stop to this.”
Now, there’s a pretty good chance Lebedev, who urged Russian supporters to “keep up the good work” when they clashed with British fans at this year’s European soccer championships, is a wingnut not to be taken as representative of the Russian response to the McLaren report.
What Russian in his right mind would publicly appeal to the president-elect of the United States, Time magazine’s person of the year, Donald J. Trump himself, to intervene in an investigation and save Russia from the prospect of an Olympic death penalty?
Not that there’s been any evidence so far that IOC president Thomas Bach has the intestinal fortitude to meet Putin’s glare without flinching.
But just in case the IOC executive board pulls its head out of its nether regions and realizes that this particular moment in history threatens the very existence of the Olympic movement, Russia needs friends in high places to keep it from being banished from the sporting landscape as a recidivist cheat that has no interest in reforming.
Ever defiant, the discredited Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA is now headed by pole vaulter Yelena Isinbaeyeva, a World Anti-Doping Agency critic and part of the Russian athletic team that was banned from competing in the Rio Olympics.
So here’s what you do, Donald. You get on the blower to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and have him start up a “Crooked Richard” hashtag and get the fake-news department — that Pizzagate woman from Belleville, maybe — to work up some stuff about how McLaren accepted bribes from WADA to phoney up the evidence against Russia, and maybe throw in a hint about child-molestation or better yet, murder.
That’s the preferred method, right? Say anything, but get the word out on social media, and the mouth-breathing public is sure to buy it.
“There’s a Russian word for fake news. It’s ‘news,’ ” Russian chess grandmaster and political activist Garry Kasparov tweeted Friday.
“Russia’s official position: evidence is not proof, the West is crazy, (whistleblower Grigory) Rodchenkov was a lone-wolf doper who may have been a CIA agent. Really,” tweeted Baltimore-based Russian sportswriter Slava Malamud, a strident Putin critic. “McLaren’s report is so damning, there may be no choice for Putin but to promote doperin-chief Mutko again.”
That would be Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister during the 2012 and 2014 Olympics, who’s now the deputy prime minister. He is threatening to take legal action, presumably against WADA, or McLaren, or the IOC.
Poor Russians. The whole world is against them, even their own expatriates.
In fairness (finally), this whole sickening affair is every bit as damning of the IOC and of WADA, because years of brazen deception by the Russians — who, according to the McLaren report, had a long list of “protected” athletes whose doping results would always be entered into official records as negative — reflects badly on the administration of the testing system that is supposed to be protecting sport’s integrity.
Surely the public’s sagging belief in the purity of the Olympics must be at an all-time low.
But it also ought to raise a general alarm, because the Russians, while not admitting their own guilt, must be thinking that they can’t be the only ones who circumvented WADA’s and the IOC’s testing systems.