Russia bobs and weaves in defence

Although it has been unfolding for more than two years, it’s quite fitting that the Russian doping scandal reached its apex in 2016.

In a year when t he world’s most i nfluential democracy elected a president who spent much of his campaign lying, or accusing the media of lying, or both, there is something unmistakably Trumpian about the Russian response to the revelations of their statesponsored doping scheme, which has been to attack the accusers but not actually disprove their claims.

So now we see if t he International Olympic Committee is as easily swayed as the American voting public.

While the Russians provided the expected bluster on the weekend after Canadian law professor Richard McLaren’s second report for the World Anti- Doping Agency, sticking to the line that the allegations are unproven and that Russia has been unfairly singled out as part of a Western conspiracy against them, it’s worth taking a step back to consider just what such a conspiracy would entail.

The first evidence of a high- level Russian doping program came in a German t elevision documentary, which included testimony from elite former Russian athletes, and which aired i n December 2014. That sparked an investigation from the World Anti-Doping Agency, which appointed a commission that spent several months trying to get at the truth of the allegations in the documentary.

Investigators did not find a Russian sports operation that was keen to cooperate and provide exculpatory evidence, but quite the opposite. Athletes and coaches were frequently not where they were supposed to be, which allowed them to avoid independent drug tests, and the WADA officials reported intimidation tactics and threats directed at them in Russia.

The commission’s first report, published in November of last year, concluded that the drug- taking regime i n Russian athletics was widespread.

A second report publ i shed two months l ater detailed corruption in the executive ranks at the IAAF, track and field’s international governing body, which t he c ommission uncovered in the process of its investigation of the allegations against Russia. Then, this past spring, Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Moscow’s WADA- approved doping-control laboratory, was the key source for reports in The New York Times and 60 Minutes that detailed a massive program of performance- enhancing drugs in Russian sport.

Those reports sparked another round of WADA investigations, this time carried out by McLaren, who published his early findings in July and his followup report on Friday. The short version of his conclusions is that Russia, following a disappointing showing at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, embarked on a doping program of a scale that hasn’t been seen since the days of the former East Germany, co-ordinated by the Ministry of Sport and incorporating not just all levels of Russian athletics but also the FSB, the security service that is the successor to the KGB.

If you are to believe that the charges against Russia are fiction, then all of the preceding must have been made up — two WADA investigations spanning more than 17 months, plus the German documentary and the various reports in the U.S. and British press. You’d have to believe that the dozens of people who produced the WADA reports were acting in concert to specifically accuse Russia of doing something it was not, including the invention of a huge dossier of fake evidence.

There are 1,166 pages of exhibits referenced in the latest McLaren report. One of the alarming things about the U. S. election was the number of people willing to believe that outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post would knowingly publish false information about Donald Trump, but even those prone to believe in conspiracies would have to concede that professor McLaren and his colleagues are an extremely unlikely bunch to have fabricated a massive anti-Russia conspiracy.

Consider the sheer amount of work that would have been involved: who has time to make up hundreds of spreadsheets and translate them into Russian? While his first report did contain a lot of generalities, his second release backed up everything in the first in detail.

To pick just one example, the case of a member of the Russian women’s hockey team, the report documents two separate urine samples that were in bottles that showed evidence of tampering, and which upon further testing were found to have “physiologically impossible” levels of salt — salt is commonly used to foil drug tests.

The samples then had further testing, which found the presence of male DNA, which confirmed that the hockey player’s urine had been swapped out with someone else’s clean pee. If the McLaren report is a lie, it is a lie crafted in painstaking detail.

There is a footnote that might be most telling. It notes that after the International Paralympic Committee did what the IOC would not last summer and banned the entire Russian delegation, the Russian team had a chance to refute the allegations when they appealed the ban.

McLaren provided testimony to that hearing by sworn affidavit. The Russian Paralympic Committee “decided not to cross examine him” and “called no evidence to rebut his evidence,” the CAS wrote in upholding the ban. “Thus, Professor McLaren’s evidence stands uncontradicted.” It still does.