Up to IOC to stand firm on Russian Rio ban.
WORLD WAITS TO SEE IF THE IAAF’S HISTORIC DECISION WILL BE UPHELD BY THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE
There are few more precarious positions in sport than to be waiting for the International Olympic Committee to do the right thing, but here we are. After the IAAF on Friday announced that it had upheld a ban that would prevent any Russian athlete from taking part in track and field events at the Rio Olympics, with the governing body for track saying that Russia hadn’t met the conditions to have the seven-monthold ban lifted, it will fall to the IOC to be resolute in the face of what is sure to be intense pressure applied from Russian authorities up to and including the Kremlin.
Vladimir Putin is bound to emerge from his mountain lair and declare the whole thing a Western conspiracy. ( He probably doesn’t have a mountain lair, but he should given the rest of the cartoon villainy.)
Already, there are suggestions that the IOC might look favourably on a system that allows individual Russians to have themselves cleared before Rio. President Thomas Bach, asked if the IOC would be prepared to overrule a blanket ban at an emergency meeting next week, declared only that he “cannot speculate,” about such things.
Given the IOC’s history, the statement does not exactly fill one with confidence.
That the IAAF upheld the ban is itself not a surprise, not when the World AntiDoping Agency released a report just this week that followed on its November treatise that essentially declared Russia a doping hotbed, with a countrywide conspiracy to evade and manipulate tests that was supported by the government and controlled, in an impressive bit of cheekiness, by Russia’s top antidoping officials.
The new WADA report says that efforts to corral Russian athletics into something resembling doping compliance have been largely fruitless, with hundreds of missed tests in the months since the initial ban — a period during which Russian athletes and coaches would have been thought to be as compliant as possible as they tried to work their way back into the IAAF’s good books. Instead, it documents cases of athletes gone missing when doping-control officers arrive, and says a number of Russian athletes have their address listed at a military base, where it is impossible for the independent drug-tester to get easy access. WADA even says armed federal security forces have threatened to boot the doping- control officers out of the country when they try to contact Russian athletes at these sites.
All of it is of a piece with the earlier WADA investigation, which was carried out after former Russian athletes described the country’s detailed doping-evasion tactics in a German documen- tary that was aired in late 2014. That WADA probe outlined how doping-control officers would arrive at a hotel or a training facility, be told that Athletes X and Y were there, and then soon have a team official inform them that no, sorry, they weren’t. These are not the droids you’re looking for.
The thing that is new and unusual about these WADA investigations is not that Russia has been busted because a certain number of athletes have failed tests — although that also did happen — but because of the broader accusations about the Russian ( anti-) doping operation that calls the whole thing into question. Some of the whistleblowers have moved — fled is probably more accurate — to the United States, and one of them, the former director of Russian’s anti- doping lab, told The New York Times last month that his job was to provide Russian athletes with a steroid cocktail that they would use during training. The athletes would then be given advance notice of testing dates, so they could stop taking the drugs in time to be assured of a clean test. Again, this is the anti- doping boss talking. If the people in charge of ensuring a country’s athletes are clean are in fact running a performance- enhancement factory, it’s hard to blame anyone from a rival nation for assuming that anyone competing under the Russian flag has doped. And it’s easier to accept the logic of a blanket ban: If the whole system is compromised, how could any one athlete’s clean test be trusted?
Beckie Scott, the former Canadian Olympian and current chair of WADA’s athletes committee, said on Friday that the IAAF’s strong line was “a monumental and historic day in many ways.” There was a message here: if they erred on the side of clean athletes, so be it.
The recent addition of meldonium to WADA’s list of banned substances has provided an interesting case study in how Russian operations worked. Suddenly, Russians from all over the sporting map, from tennis star Maria Sharapova to track Olympians to junior hockey players, are being linked to the drug, which appears to have been handed out routinely by the country’s sports officials. The obvious conclusion is that Russia directed its athletes for years to use meldonium in hopes of improving athletic performance, and then didn’t adjust, or adjusted too late, when the drug was put on the banned list on Jan. 1.
The meldonium case doesn’t prove the many other allegations of Russian doping, but it’s one more piece of evidence that the country’s drug programs were wide in scope, as opposed to individual athletes trying to cheat the system.
It’s certainly possible that other nations do this, too, and that WADA only found out about what was going on in Russia because it decided to give Russia a hard look. If it gave the same sort of intense scrutiny elsewhere, it might discover similar levels of drug- testing shadiness.
But Russia is where it looked. It found astonishing levels of non- compliance. The blanket ban might be unprecedented, but so was the evidence that preceded it.
THAT THE IAAF UPHELD THE BAN IS ITSELF NOT A SURPRISE.